“What is wrong with life is human memory, she thought. What is the point of life and history--all that human beings sacrifice and endure, overcome and rejoice over--if we do not remember? What point are the centuries, years, months, hours, minutes, if they slip through our fingers, if we learn nothing?”

“How do they manage to go on living?.....By loving life. And-in spite of everything-by loving God. By having enough faith to start over again and again; enough faith to risk having our hearts break all over again. That's the true meaning of faith. It's the deepest kind of heroism.”

“When there was nothing left to gain, nothing more to lose, when one was face-to-face with the moment of greatest despair, to speak to God in love and thanks, rather than to curse Him and one's fate, was the ultimate choice of any human creature, and perhaps the ultimate expression of one's humanity.”

“To love human beauty is to love something whose very existence is doomed. Love should be based on permanence. On solid, secure things.....Love of God. Love of good deeds. Love of country and family. Love of ideas.”

“He who gives life, nourishes life. He listens, this I can tell you. Whatever happens, He's listening. He doesn't always answer right away. He doesn't always say yes. But He's listening. This much I promise you.”

“...self-important western journalists who'd given up their sacred trust to become cheerleaders for trendy causes, the way communist journalists had once been cheerleaders for the government...They were depriving the free world of its most valuable weapon in condemning and exposing the worst human scourge since Nazism: the targeting and murder of civilians to achieve political and religious ends.”

“Elizabeth feared that because of her looks, she was doomed to meet men with unreasonably high self-images and no depth, the kind that dogged movie actresses and models. Men who were superficial to begin with, and existentially boring in that which they sought, and thus ultimately unsatisfying and unworthy of respect of interest.”