“In all your years as a priest, I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times: ‘Why does he do this if he loves us? Why does he shake down our homes? Destroy our cities? Let our children starve?’ They ask these questions, not because they are confused... but because they suspect the truth. And you share their suspicions.”

“We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all of our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our lord.”

“‎Halt looked up at the trees above him."Why does this boy ask so many questions?" he asked the trees.Naturally, they didn't answer.”

“I have this friend, Jake," Mr. Mitchell says, sitting on the edge of his desk. "One day, I needed a favor. It wasn't a big favor, but I called him and told him I needed something. Know what he said?" We shake our heads."He said, 'Sure.' Before he eve knew what i was going to ask him. You know why?"We shake our heads again. "Because he trusted me not to ask him to do something he couldn't or wouldn't want to do. He knew that whatever i asked for, he would help me simply because he was my friend and I needed help. That's true friendship.”

“A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.”

“The Eleven king looked sternly upon Thorin, when he was brought before him, and asked him many questions. But Thorin would only say that he was starving. "Why did you and your folk three times try to attack my people at their merrymaking?" asked the king. "We did not attack them," answered Thorin, "we came to beg because we were starving." "Where are your friends now, and what are they doing?" "I don't know, but I expect that they're all starving in the forest." "What were you doing in the forest?" "Looking for food and drink, because we were starving." "And what brought you into the forest at all?" asked the king angrily. At that Thorin shut his mouth and would not say another word.”