“What if I'd been wrong all this time? I'd been so angry that God didn't fit the description I wanted him to fit.”

“People lie to themselves all the time. If they lie to themselves, how can you expect them not to lie to you?”

“It's just not that easy answer you want wrapped up in a pretty, little bow. Nothing real ever is, but that doesn't mean it's hopeless.”

“What he felt during his Spanish encounter with left-wing anti-Christianity was similar to his reactions to the anti-Christianity of the right. The "novelty and shock of the Nazis", Auden wrote, and the blitheness with which Hitler's acolytes dismissed Christianity "on the grounds that to love one's neighbor as oneself was a command fit only for effeminate weaklings", pushed him inexorably toward unavoidable questions. "If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?" The answer to this question, he wrote later, was part of what "brought me back to the church.”

“Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking; You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits.”

“It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.”

“It was that simple. God spoke to Carey about the needs of the lost in other lands. And Carey wished to respond. After all, was that not what the Bible told him to do?”