“My God...it can think.”

“My God, it can recognise another human being when it's hit over the head with one.”

“The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets call the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images.”

“Margery," I blurted out in a passion of frustration. "I don't know what to make of you!"Nor I you, Mary. Frankly, I cannot begin to comprehend the motives of a person who dedicates a large portion of her life to the contemplation of a God in whom she only marginally believes."I felt stunned, as if she had struck me in the diaphragm. She looked down at me, trying to measure the effect of her words.Mary, you believe in the power that the idea of God has on the human mind. You believe in the way human beings talk about the unknowable, reach for the unattainable, pattern their imperfect lives and offer their paltry best up to the beingless being that created the universe and powers its continuation. What you balk as it believing the evidence of your eyes, that God can reach out and touch a single human life in a concrete way." She smiled a sad, sad smile. "You mustn't be so cold, Mary. If you are, all you will see is a cold God, cold friends, cold love. God is not cold-never cold. God sears with heat, not ice, the heat of a thousand suns, heat that inflames but does not consume. You need warmth, Mary-you, Mary, need it. You fear it, you flirt with it, you imagine that you can stand in its rays and retain your cold intellectual attitude towards it. You imagine that you can love with your brain. Mary, oh my dear Mary, you sit in the hall and listen to me like some wild beast staring at a campfire, unable to leave, fearful of losing your freedom if you come any closer. It won't consume you; I won't capture you. Love does not do either. It only brings life. Please, Mary, don't let yourself be tied up by the bonds of cold academia."Her words, the power of her conviction, broke over me like a great wave, inundating me, robbing me of breath, and, as they receded in the room, they pulled hard at me to folllow. I struggled to keep my footing against the wash of Margery's vision, and only when it began to lose its strength, dissipated against the silence in the room, was I seized by a sudden terror at the nearness of my escape.”

“Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses.But there's nothing like a book.”

“Stop it!'He relented, so far as he could, stepping forward to take my head into his hands. 'Russell, once, only once, I was taken and suffered for it. Please, my dear wife, believe me, this is not the same situation...'...I turned back to Holmes and hissed, 'If you're wrong, I shall be extremely angry with you.' Then O kissed him hard on the lips, more threat than affection, and let him step back into his cell...'However, Russ? I think that, all in all, given the choice, I prefer you with the hair and without the moustache.”

“However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the "Eureka!" comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking.”