“Angels may be safe from damnation, but human beings are less fortunate things, and for them hell is always close”

“He knew as well as we in our own world do that the road to hell is paved with good intentions--but he also knew that, for human beings, good intentions are sometimes all there are. Angels may be safe from damnation, but human beings are less fortunate things, and for them hell is always close.”

“If there's to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. He knew a little about damnation himself… and he had an idea that the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning.”

“It'll be your damnation, boy. You'll wear out a hundred pairs of boots on your way to hell.”

“Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.”

“Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

“Speech destroys the function of love, I think-that's a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words can close those love bites. it's the other way around, that's the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them.”