“Listening is an attitude of the heart, a genuine desire to be with another which both attracts and heals. (attr to J. Isham)”

“Manicures: Which are basically just holding hands with a stranger for forty-five minutes whilst listening to Enya.”

“I'm no doormat. At worst, I'm a very attractive accent rug, because if I get stained or damaged, someone is going to f---ing die.”

“God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.”

“Peace, hands and mouth smeared with chocolate pudding, blinks and says nothing. Happy frowns. Bliss, firmly ensconced on Liesel’s hip, babbles something so cute and precious it would be nice to take a second to appreciate it, but Liesel is caught between her genuine and somewhat frightening fury and her shame at realizing that she’s turned into everything she swore she’d never be.”

“Even the darkest of villans-can have a hero's heart.”

“Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. (3)”