“No one, except Ronny, had any idea of what passed in her mind, and he only dimly, for where there is officialism every human relationship suffers.”

“To respect the dignity of a relationship also implies accepting the end when it comes. Except in my mind, except in my dreams, where the aftertaste of her still lingers.”

“Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.”

“A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.”

“And what more can God do,' he asks, 'then to take on flesh and suffer every humiliation and every fear and every pain that humanity suffers? What more without destroying human freedom?”

“She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having renounced dealings with all words except that one, never utters another, in any circumstance...The sentence enters her mind from a book she had been looking at earlier. Her gaze is drifting across the sky where the moon sits in a great cold ring as she recalls more and more words. Only one thing matters, only one word. If we speak, it is because we have not found that thing, nor shall find it.”