“Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.”

“What if it's as simple as one moment? One tiny thing, like that kiss on the rocks? What if I'd kissed him a little longer? Would he be alive right now? Or what if I'd stayed with him Friday night, what if I'd been with him… wherever he was?”

“The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.”

“Be with a leader when he is right, stay with him when he is still right, but, leave him when he is wrong.”

“When the Lord makes it clear you're to follow Him in this new direction, focus fully on Him and refuse to be distracted by comparisons with others.”

“Life seemed to him a gift; the statement ‘I am alive’ seemed to him to contain a satisfactory certainty and many other things, held up as indubitable, seemed to him uncertain.”