“It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.”

“Think how much less stupefying the last fifty years might have been if people had actually read Marx.”

“...good fortune is not only good fortune, and over the years things happened in that family that caused some terrible regret. Still, for years it all seemed to me to be blindingly beautiful. And it was.”

“Your mother goes to the public library, which has been down on its luck for a long time, like most things around here. Last time she brought back a copy of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine that was worn ragged, all held together with tape. She just sank into it, though, she just melted into it.”

“It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.”

“I’m not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it, just because that is what people who talk about it normally do.”

“You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of the mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten.”