“People say, How could God allow helpless children to die? While I look around the world and see corruption, pollution, filth, lies, deception, poverty, and heartache, and I say, Gee, how come I wasn’t lucky enough to have God snatch me out of the world? Those people don’t know what lies beyond death, so who are they to assume that children leaving the world early is necessarily a bad thing? For all they know heaven is full of candy and cartoons.
”

“I could never have imagined this world if I hadn't spent almost eight decades walking around in it. People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives.”

“...I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty. I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure. I trusted God to sustain the world although I could not say for sure how that happened. I trusted God to hold me and those I loved, in life and in death, without giving me one shred of conclusive evidence that it was so.”

“People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives.”

“But you can’t make war personal,” I say, “or you’ll never make the right decisions.”“And if you didn’t make personal decisions, you wouldn’t be a person. All war is personal somehow, isn’t it? For somebody? Except it’s usually hate.”“Lee—”“I’m just saying how lucky he is to have someone love him so much they’d take on the whole world.” His Noise is uncomfortable, wondering what I’m looking like, how I’m responding. “That’s all I’m saying.”“He’d do it for me,” I say quietly.I’d do it for you too, Lee’s Noise says.And I know he would.But those people who die because we do it, don’t they have people who’d kill for them?So who’s right?”

“Nobody knows what horrors I have saved the world from 'cuz people can't see what never happened. All evil flows from independence, and independence is your choice. If I were to simply revoke all the choices of independence, the world as you know it would cease to exist and love would have no meaning. This world is not a playground where I keep all my children free from evil. Evil is the chaos of this age that you brought to me, but it will not have the final say. Now it touches everyone that I love, those who follow me and those who don't. If I take away the consequences of people's choices, I destroy the possibilities of love. Love that is forced is no love at all.”