“Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic. ”

“Last night I'd made love to a woman for the first and last time. It had been amazing and I had a memory that would shape the rest of my life.”

“Faith should be a tool to set us free, not a means to fuel a fascist agenda seeking to impede the civil liberties of the "us"s. The first shall be last and the last shall be first... therefore, those who stand for their Pius self-righteousness in order to trample those they deem inferior will be the 'last' and the poor and oppressed shall be 'first.' If the self-righteous want a lesson on morality, then actually take a lesson from Jesus whose best friend was a former hooker and whose mother was a single parent.”

“Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.”

“For the first time, but certainly not the last, I began to believe that Arsenal's moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own”

“and even now we labor in our residual gloom, until in your only Son we become your righteousness; for that righteousness is like God's high and holy mountains, while your judgments, which were all the being we then had, are like the deep.”