“Shebna scraped the tablet clean and began drawing circles in the soft clay. "Suppose you had six figs and you ate two. How many would--""Four." Hezekiah answered before Shebna finished, and the tutor's thick black eyebrows rose in surprise."And suppose I had five figs. How many would we--""Nine.""Have you done this before?"Hezekiah thought the question was ridiculous. "I've eaten figs lots of times.”

“She loved him, and her heart was breaking. If she had known how much it hurt to love someone, she never would have given away her heart. But it wasn't a question of giving as much as falling.”

“No, Hezekiah...no.. I don't deserve forgiveness. He lifted his head to look at her. None of us do. But God doesn't treat us as our sins deserve. He took her hands in his. I should have shown you that. I should have shown you my God instead of making you serve a God you didn't know. I only showed you his rules and laws. But God doesn't want us to worship Him out of fear. He is our Father, and He wants us to learn to love Him with all our heart and all our soul and all our strength. I should have helped you know Him.”

“You know what I wish? I wish I could put time in a bottle and throw it into the ocean. Then I would have forever to spend with you. I wouldn’t need air to breathe or food to eat. Holding you in my arms would be all the food I would need. Having your love would be the only air I would need to breathe.”

“Our trials are supposed to turn us toward God, but we whine and complain and wish someone would turn down the fire so we could have our old life back the way it was.”

“If you truly understood the holiness of God, you would have a proper attitude about yourself.”

“In the past I had often tried to escape the grown-up world of sorrow through my imagination- dreaming that a handsome young lieutenant would ride to my rescue or that a great empresario would discover my musical talents and whisk me away. I had envisioned knights in shining armor and happily ever after scenes to escape from rules or boredom or pain; including a vision of my mother walking through our front door whole and well again. Now I knew that a lifetime of escape led to a life like Aunt Bertie's. My imagination was a gift, but I had to live in the real world. My eyes had been opened this summer to poverty and crime and abuse and I needed to use my imagination not to escape, but to help people like Irina and Katya, to make my own contribution as the women in the women's pavilion had done. I couldn't do it in the same way Jane Adams and my grandmother and Aunt Mat were, but I would find my own way and my own time.”