“God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.”

“[Toby] reflected that being cruel sometimes makes you rich and powerful, but it always makes you ugly.”

“You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold'. You knew, but you didn't understand." He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy's cold cheeks. "Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?”

“Not all superstitions are dark and cruel. I once received a communication from the god Osiris. He was living at that time in a suburb of Boston.”

“It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.”

“It is because people live in the things they possess instead of in their relationship to God that God seems at times to be cruel.”