“Yes, Eden was beautiful- and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it- so be it. (Hasn’t it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? ‘Presume not the ways of God to scan,’ you’ve been told in umpteen variations, ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That’s generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.)”

“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.”

“I find I still adore walking. Absurd, obviously, what with it being merely a case of putting one foot in front of the other and so on - but there you are.”

“This had occurred to me. But for no reason I can dignify with anything higher than the authority of a two-hundred-year-old gut I didn’t buy it. “It’s possible,” I said. “Of course it’s possible.” “But you don’t think so” “No. I’m not sure why.” Another silence, her intelligence working. Then a very slight smile. “It’s because it would be less romantic,” she said.”

“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.”

“When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile.”

“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.”