“Certainly the best times were when I was alone with mathematics, free of ambition and pretense, and indifferent to the world.”

“He has never known a woman so free from conceit, vanity, ambition, pretense. He has never known a woman so willing to show the world that she is a human being.”

“I am not alone at all, I thought. I was never alone at all. And that, of course, is the message of Christmas. We are never alone. Not when the night is darkest, the wind coldest, the world seemingly most indifferent. For this is still the time God chooses.”

“They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.”

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

“Perhaps only when human effort had done it's best and failed, would God's power alone be free to work.”