“I figured anybody who talked about church as much as she did was using it a little like cocaine anyhow.”

“Maybe learning to be human was about learning to live in pain, not trying to figure out how to live pain-free. (156)”

“What about my rights? What about a person's privacy? Did all that just go to hell after 9/11?”

“God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces.”

“What was it about not knowing a person that allowed you to wonder whether she might be the answer to all your problems?”

“Plenty of people who survive tragedies end up ambivalent about danger--frightened by it, yet strangely drawn to it.”

“Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land--too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.”