“Aunt Emily says grown-ups never really like playing. They do it to please us.""They little know," Gerald answered, "how often we do it to please them.”

“In a way, watching an attractive, potentially dangerous guy play guitar is a little like watching a tiger agree to do tricks for his trainer. You know that they could just turn and kill you. But you're so flattered and pleased that instead they agreed to stand on a decorative box and wave and count for the crowd that for a while you forget how big the scary part of them really is.”

“Please what? the teacher thinks. Please break the law? Please put myself and the school at risk? But, no, that's not it at all. What he's really saying is: Please be a human being. With a life so full of rules and regiments, it's so easy to forget that's what they are. She knows—she sees—how often compassion takes a back seat to expediency.”

“He asked me if i really knew what i was doing. I never answered, because I'm not sure we ever really know what we are doing. We feel things in our hearts, make decisions, hear voices in our heads that tells us what to do, but in the end we never know how things will turn out.”

“If Thou canst do something with us and through us, then please, God, do something without us! Bypass us and take up a people who now know Thee not!”

“The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.”