“Women, after a certain age, never look at you anymore with absolute faith showing in their eyes. Those candles are for children. Rather, paradoxically, when a women is beginning to have faith in you, she eyes you with doubt, as if she were weighing you in as trustworthy, but against her better judgment.”

“It's hard for a man to know exactly when a woman doesn't trust him anymore. Maybe it's because a women goes on trying to have faith, knowing her faith is important, and so she tries not to identify a particular moment she stops respecting him. Only later can she look back and see a time when something inside her decided.”

“. . . But then you will want to put that {publication} behind you right away. You will want to recover the obscurity you swim best through. You've got eternal youth there. You'll never be satisfied. If you get lucky, it will be a darkness so pure it will mirror not the 'self,' but the mysterious 'other.”

“It's not the heart that decides, or still less the brain, but rather it's the voice in the throat that goes ahead into all these risks.”

“Do you have something to surrender today? Do you need God to meet you in the fire like he did those three men? Because sometimes you have to step out on faith into something that’s gonna scare you so bad, your hair’s gonna stand and you’re gonna be crying for your mama before God pulls you through the other side.”

“Now listen. Faith is like oxygen. It keeps you afloat at all times. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you don’t. but when you do need it you better be practiced at having faith, otherwise it won’t work. That’s why the missionaries built all the churches. Before we got those churches we weren’t practicing enough. That’s what prayers are for—practice, children. Practice.”

“I see who I am reflected in your eyes. I know what you think about me. But what if I told you, you were wrong?”