“Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

“Police work wouldn't be possible without coffee," Wallander said."No work would be possible without coffee."They pondered the importance of coffee in silence.”

“If contemporary Christians took seriously the possibility that those outside the boundaries of the church might hold the promise of renewal, if we ceased regarding ourselves as the source of salvation and the secular world as a potential threat, and if we emulated Jesus' example in accepting the faith and the courage of those who live beyond conventional standards of purity, well, I can hardly imagine how things would look.”

“And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.”

“If people are either mountain people or ocean people then I'm a mountain person. I love the ocean, the few times I get a chance to see it, but I'm a mountain girl.”

“I had a day when I was busy in the world, where the activity created a turmoil on the surface of my consciousness like waves on the surface of the ocean, which made it difficult to see through the waves to the inner silence. It reminded me that we need to develop both the capacity to use the mind when engaged in activity and social relations, and to be able to let go of the activity and to come in contact with the deep inner silence. The relationship between being active in the world and in social relations and the inner silence is like the relationship between the waves on the surface of the ocean and the deep inner silence on the bottom of the ocean.”