“Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life.But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it.”

“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”

“She didn't want to look ahead to the days and the months and the years with him. Here, now, in this room, it was all right, but later? Again, time couldn't stop. And she saw at last that time only stopped when you were dead...Time was always moving and nothing could stay the same, everything was always changing, for better or for worse. And you had to change with time, with the seasons and the years, or you would be dead too, although your heart would continue to beat.”

“I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake — especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.”

“Aquinas wondered what would happen if God wanted to achieve universal resurrection. In other words, bringing everybody who had ever lived back to life at the same time. What would happen to cannibals, and the people they ate? You couldn't bring them all back at the same time, because the cannibals are made of the people they have eaten. You could have one but not the other. Ha.' I looked at Rowan. 'That's a good example of a paradox.”

“Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them-especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.”