“It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.”

“I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.”

“We each carry our own designated end within us, our very own death ripening at its own rate inside of us. There are insignificant people who are harboring unawares the grandeur of large deaths. We carry it in us like a darkening fruit. It opens and spills out. That is death.”

“Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to.”

“We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah.”

“I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy.”

“one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. “At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.”