“The magistrate's Toryism had taught Jacob, I think - with Toryism and other forms of villainy - to hate the sin and not the sinner”

“We tend to be taken aback by the thought that God could be angry. how can a deity who is perfect and loving ever be angry?...We take pride in our tolerance of the excesses of others. So what is God's problem?... But love detests what destroys the beloved. Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys. Nearly a century ago the theologian E.H. Glifford wrote: 'Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.'... Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference... How can a good God forgive bad people without compromising himself? Does he just play fast and loose with the facts? 'Oh, never mind...boys will be boys'. Try telling that to a survivor of the Cambodian 'killing fields' or to someone who lost an entire family in the Holocaust. No. To be truly good one has to be outraged by evil and implacably hostile to injustice.”

“Life is short, but it is wide. Genevieve Whitman taught me that.”

“That girl in the backseat of the beater, I wonder if she's bored d restless, stuck in this small town, hating the slow, stoned laughter and the same rock song on the radio. I hope she caught a glimpse of me through the steam. Even if she only saw my tear widen and my legs kick off the ground, she might think I know where I'm going. She might think I've found a way.”

“One of the functions of landscape it to correspond to, nurture, and provoke exploration of the landscape of the imagination. Space to walk is also space to think, and I think that's one thing landscapes give us: places to think longer, more uninterrupted thoughts or thoughts to a rhythm other than the staccato of navigating the city.”

“What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.”

“I don't hate you, you're just the most annoying person in my life.”