“women live the lie from birth on, and then one day they realize that it's too late for them, they're too old to write a book or solve a difficult problem in math, they'll never learn to sing or play the piano, they showed such promise early on. so they run to the priest, their voices take on a hysterical edge, like the one mine has right now, and the priest tells them they have lived righteously and their reward will be in heaven, and he could certainly use someone in the kitchen for the potluck on Sunday night. ”

“My mother was good at reading books, making cinnamon biscuits, and coloring in a coloring book. Also she was a good eater of popcorn and knitter of sweaters with my initials right in them. She could sit really still. She knew how to believe in God and sing really loudly. When she sneezed our whole house rocked. My father was a great smoker and driver of vehicles..He could hold a full coffee cup while driving and never spill a drop, even going over bumps. He lost his temper faster than anyone.”

“I figure heaven will be a scratch-and-sniff sort of place, and one of my first requests will be the Driftwood in its prime, while it was filled with our life. And later I will ask for the smell of my dad's truck, which was a combination of basic truck (nearly universal), plus his cologne (Old Spice), unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and when I was very lucky, leaded gasoline. If I could have gotten my nose close enough I would have inhaled leaded gasoline until I was retarded. The tendency seemed to run in my family; as a boy my uncle Crandall had an ongoing relationship with a gas can he kept in the barn. Later he married and divorced the same woman four times, sometimes marrying other women in between, including one whose name was, honestly, Squirrelly.”

“...he said almost nothing, and ground his teeth against his desire to tell them the truth: God is helpless. We are at the mercy of our own radical freedom, and all God can do is take into God's self the grief, the violence, the sublime acts of kindness, the good sex. God comes to us from the future, and has only one godlike gift: the lure. We are lured toward truth, beauty, and goodness...the lure is pulling at our hearts like some lucid joy inside every actual occasion and all we have to do is...Say yes.”

“Possibility, infinity, beauty -- none of those words were right. [...] What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of your ruin? ”

“He did know: he knew her right away, and he felt known by her, and that was where the trouble really began...She could have been exotic or worldly or a Valkyrie and it would have meant nothing to him. But that Alice saw him―that was a feeling Amos had never experienced before, and it felt like a revelation and also like a virus.”

“There are people in this world so perfect that the fact of them seems like a personal gift...”