“You can’t kill history. You can’t shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that—if it’s going to die, it has to die on its own”

“You can’t explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn’t even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work.”

“It’s peculiar, to reach your destination,” he told me. “You think you’ll arrive and perform the thing you came for and depart in contentment. Instead you get there and find distance still to go.”

“When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.”

“Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave - now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth.”

“Be careful whom you choose to hate.The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly.Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.”

“It is one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also. You are very near then to being friendless in this world.”