“He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.”

“It doesn't bother me," I said. "If you don't mind looking forty years old at twenty, smelling like an ashtray, and getting lung cancer, why should I?”

“He'd tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in your later years.”

“He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world - he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was.”

“God was something I did not understand the way kids who went to church did. They said God was a man in the sky with white hair and a beard like Santa. This seemed strange to me. When I thought of God, I imagined only mist over the pond, a sliver of moon in a dark sky, scatterings of stars, birdsong.”

“The inflections of community are important because they get at the very meanings of marriage. Marriage is a gift God gives the church. He does not simply give it to the married people of the church, but to the whole church, just as marriage is designed not only for the benefit of the married couple. It is designed to tell a story to the entire church, a story about God’s own love and fidelity to us”