“He was the measure of the failure of his father's body, and also perhaps a portending of the failure of his own.~”

“A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”

“And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having.”

“He will talk to me a little while, too shy to tell me why he has come, and then he will thank me and leave, walking backward a few steps, thinking, Yes, the barn is still there, yes, the lilacs, even the pot of petunias. This was my father's house. And I will think, He is young. He cannot know that my whole like has come down to this moment.That he has answered his father's prayers.”

“You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”

“It says Jesus puts His hearer in the role of the father, of the one who forgives. Because if we are, so to speak, the debtor and of course we are that too, that suggests no graciousness in us. And grace is the great gift. The other half is that we also can forgive, restore, and liberate, and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves.”

“...you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature.”