“I realized then that if I could teach my children only one or two basic principles, tolerance would be one of them.”

“Live every moment—no matter where you are and what you're doing—as if it were truly important... you must strive to be in a good place—a place of purpose and integrity... Life is short under any circumstance and in some cases it can be plucked away at a moment's notice.”

“I needed to talk to my dad. My dad who had been to war, who had seen its horrors, who suffered from its nightmares, my dad who was a good man, the best man I’d ever known, who, along with my uncle, I wanted to honor by teaching military kids—my dad, the only one who I would believe if he would just tell me I could be good, too, that I could do right by my students, because for sure they were going to suffer. It’s just cause and effect. We’re at war. The military fights wars. I teach military kids. I’d never served, but now I could make a difference. I just needed my dad to tell me what to do, to tell me I was good enough to get it done.”

“It makes me boil when I think of the power we profess and the utter impotency of our action. Believers who know one-tenth as much as we do are doing one-hundred times more for God, with His blessing and our criticism. Oh if I could write it, preach it, say it, paint it, anything at all, if only God's power would become known among us.”

“My wife was out and I was home alone with Emma when my mother called. She said, "Oh, so you're babysitting?" As politely as I could manage, I answered, "I call it fathering." She realized immediately what she had said and apologized. I realized that when she was a child, and again as a mother of young children, father's active involvement with their infants was so minimal that it could fairly be called baby-sitting.”

“Always Sami. I was tethered to her somehow. To that scared little girl I’d found on the staircase nearly a year earlier; to the past, when teaching was simpler and I could care about everyday problems, when being relentless meant running two extra laps, not waiting for an MP to search the undercarriage of a bus for bombs before letting students approach it.”

“Son of a bitch! I own your place! I’m your host. Is this how you repay me? By stealing my woman?” The spirit stopped and turned. “No one owns me,” he said. “I go where I will.” “Yeah well I’ll fill in your fucking pond and build a goddamned parking lot! How would you like that? Huh? I‘ll build condos. I’ll tear up the whole damned forest and pave it over!” The spirit stopped and regarded him. Angus swept the rain from his face as he waited for the spirit’s reply, the two of them hovering in the storm.”