“We all have to have something to hold on to, even if it’s our own torso.”

“We all need something to embrace, even if it’s just our own torso.”

“It’s hard to trust our own decisions, but we have no options. We have to do that in order to be all right with ourselves.”

“We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character.”

“When Jesus tells us to give all we have...we don't have authority to decline. We are not our own; we have no claim on our own lives.”

“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”