A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.

One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.

To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost." So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.

It is very disturbing to see people use Christianity and the Bible to support a certain political agenda, especially when one cannot connect that agenda with the authentic teachings of Christ.

Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of "redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

Life itself must be founded upon the infinite possibility for choice and accident. And if we cannot prove that it is, we must believe that it is. We must believe that we can change, that we can control, that we can direct our own destinies.

You look good to me, you damnable little devil, good to embrace and good to love.