“He is remembering," I say."Remembering what?""It's a word I use for praying. Sometimes it's like waiting for music to come out of the silence.”

“The "real stuff" is what he calls the music that is piped in through the speaker in the machine. The music that comes from inside my head is not considered real.”

“Maybe I don't feel what others feel. I have no way of knowing. But I do feel. It's just that what I feel does not elicit tears. What I feel when others cry is more like a dry, empty aloneness, like I'm the only person left in the world.”

“Be in the world but not of the world.' The words are from Jesus. But I have not the slightest idea how to accomplish that or even if it's possible. The world will always poke you in the chest with its index finger.”

“What the author of Genesis wants to tell us, I think, is that man, when united with God, is not divided. In this unity, there is no good and evil. All of our inclinations, even the sexual ones, are good when we are in Eden -- that is, when we walk with God and all our actions, words, and thoughts seek to follow His will. But man can choose to be separate from God, and in this separateness he creates evil by imagining ways to use what is good in ways that hurt him or others, and then acting upon what he imagines.”

“I hope you make it through law school still feeling like you do.' 'Why wouldn't I?' I asked him. And he answered, 'Sometimes you start off going one way and you eng up going another way and you don't know how it happened.”

“God's love descends on some like dew on a flower, blessed be He, but sometimes we trudge along our comfortable lives and bam, He descends on us like a splash of gasoline... and then He strikes a match.”