“She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched.”

“There have been times," Father Mark admitted, "when I feared that God would turn out to be like my maternal grandmother [...] Ours was a large family, and every Christmas my grandmother gave gifts of cash in varying amounts, claiming she was rewarding her grandchildren according to how much they loved her. She swore she could look right into our hearts and know. One child would get a crisp fifty-dollar bill, the next a crumpled single. No two gifts were ever in the same amount."Miles nodded. "Well, maybe there's a hell.”

“She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time.”

“I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.”

“Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.”

“I'm about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don't have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I'm going to anyway.”

“She never answers during the day," Max explained. "She lets her machine pick up."People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with," Miles told him. "In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology.”