“My statement to Harris that his book contains much to admire is specious hyperbole. In The End of Faith, Harris rails against religious fundamentalism, which seems obvious, as well as against religious moderates, which seems intolerant.”

“You know the way Jesus rips open his shirt to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny, the way he points to it. I’m afraid the way I’ll miss you will be this obvious.”

“There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.”

“note: The phrase Son of God had many meanings in Jesus' time, one of which was "a son born without a father," which, by all accounts, Jesus was. Just as the phrase virgin birth could mean simply an unmarried woman giving birth, which, by all accounts, describes Jesus' mother (see Geza Vermes, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus).”

“There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under.”

“The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven't seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or toward impermanence. The boat's sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog's so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown.”

“Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.”