“The sages have a hundred maps to giveThat trace their crawling cosmos like a treeThey rattle reason out through many a sieveThat stores the sand but lets the gold go freeAnd all these things are less than dust to meBecause my name is Lazarus and I live.”

“Theology is like a map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God--experiences compared with which many thrills of pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further you must use the map.”

“A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.”

“The price for this tea is anything from a hundred in gold to a half sen. If you want to drink free, that's all right too. I'm only sorry I can't let you have it for less.”

“I like to think of myself as a reasonable man. But I have buried too many friends in the too-recent past, and I have seen too many lies go unquestioned, and too many questions go unasked. There is a time when even reasonable men must begin to take unreasonable actions. To do anything else is to be less than human.”

“Clearly I have a talent now: I can trace every single thing back to a certain, scared place in the map of my heart.”