“God must feel the same at the end of a long day. Stop trying to make Me happy with all that ritual up and down, all the good works and psychic genuflecting. All the good works in the world will not bring you and closer to Me. Stand still. Let Me look at you and find Myself reflected. Maybe for a brief moment, you thought it was all about you, but surprise, Creation. It is all about Me.”

“Life must have sucked growing up without TV." "Back then people could wait a few days to learn about all the things they couldn't control. . . Nowadays we're much more impatient for our impotence.”

“All the Baptist churches she's ever visited smelled of the same sweat and boredom.”

“Secrets are always hardest at the beginning. After a while they settle in like the cavities in your teeth, and you only think about them when they hurt.”

“This is what making love must be like, she thinks. At twelve years old, she understands little more than that it will begin with loss - the loss of virginity, the loss of innocence - but that at some point there stands to be a gain.”

“Good and Evil are opposite points on a circle, Dr. Chiver. Greater good is just halfway back to Bad.”

“If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.”