“He said he "admired our courage" but didn't want to see us do anything to "damage our promising futures." He felt "proud as an American" that we had "exercised our right to peaceful free expression." But if we did it again, he didn't "know what action the state board of education might take against individual students."Translation: You've had your fun. Now sit down, shut up, and take the freakin' test. Or else.”

“We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.”

“In the depths of him, he too didn't want to go. But he was a born American, and if anything was on show, he had to see it. That was Life.”

“What He said He would do He always did, and the things we already see fulfilled in His Word simply remind us that what He said about the future will take place just as surely.”

“The light works," he said, indicating the window, "the gravity works," he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. "Anything else we have to take our chances with.”

“Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place. That's not him, we said to our mother, That's not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us..."Did you..." she said. "Every day," he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms...”