“I waited. Nothing. Here again was the colossal silence where God's, someone's, anyone's voice should have been. Learn this lesson now, my brother said, I shan't teach it twice. There is nothing. It means nothing. Then the night exhaled and flowed again. I knew with clairvoyant weariness I'd go back countless times to the question of why, how, but knew too I carried the answer inside. It had gone in like an inhaled spec of toxic dust. Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.”

“Suddenly, he missed her, their shared history. The way they remained tuned to each other across a room full of people. He's look up and see her green eyes glance at him. Yes. I know. Us. They'd known there was nothing novel about it as far as the world was concerned; they'd known it was only love, which the world had seen billions of times before. Or rather Cheryl had known. He'd never considered it. Having fallen in love with her he'd realised love was what he's been waiting for. The question of what he [i]wanted[/i] out of life had been answered. Whereas Cheryl had space left over. It was one of the differences between them. It was what kept him striving towards her.”

“The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.”

“Some part of me . . . had been waiting, since Kelp's death, for certainty that God . . . was either dead or malicious. On the cot, now, in the rain-shadowed room with the medicine smells, I knew it was worse than that. They were a challenge, a dare: you must look at the horrors of the world and find a way back to faith in spite of what you saw. I had a glimpse of what the purer version of myself might be capable of: enduring the loss, keeping the rage and disgust down, finding meaning through suffering. But it was only a glimpse. There was so much shame, and the shame made me angry at the thought of getting better.”

“It’s just what you’re stuck with, the lousy furniture you can’t change. The educated me knows hell’s nothing, a fiction I happened to inherit. The other me knows I’m going there. There must be a dozen mes these days, taking turns looking the other way.” “It’s the postmodern solution,” I said. “Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself.”

“You can't blame me. I mean that literally. You're incapable of blaming me. You're human. Being human is choosing freedom over imprisonment, autonomy over dependency, liberty over servitude. You can't blame me because you know (come on, man, you've always known) that the idea of spending eternity with nothing to do except praise God is utterly unappealing. You'd be catatonic after an hour. Heaven's a swiz because to get in you have to leave yourself outside. You can't blame me because -- now do please be honest with yourself for once -- you'd have left, too.”

“Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.”