“It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.”

“I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His mortal time”

“Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground--a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of his laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his creator.”

“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.”

“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's strange how you never quite get used to the world at night.”

“You never bother me, Glory. It's remarkable how much you don't bother me. Almost unprecedented.”