“Catherine! Get out of my way. I need to have a word with that thing."Since she usually called Bones "filthy animal", I assumed "thing" meant Ian.”

“Her mouth was open, as if she wanted to say something, and I wanted to kiss her to show her that sometimes you don't need words. Sometimes they only get in the way, and you end up talking yourself out of things you need. People you want.”

“The way I see it," she continued, "is that some things are just meant to be theway they are.”

“I resisted the urge to hurl my plate at him. “Of course not, Ian. It’s just that normally at this hour, Bones and I are fucking like rabbits, so I get twitchy when I have to wait for him to climb aboard.”

“I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.”

“In my return to church, I had learned the hard way to avoid assumptions about other people's faith. For one thing, people kept surprising me. If I listened carefully to them, my conjectures about what they thought usually turned out to be wrong. For another thing, I was insecure enough about my own faith, such as it was, to resent other people telling me what they thought I believed and why they thought I believed it. So I tried to hear what my friends say about joining their loved ones after death without assuming I knew exactly what they meant.”