You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

What was even more germane was my study of the history of religion. It was one of the few things in school I was fascinated by.

Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?

He had heard her say, so many times, that a society that approved of making abortion illegal was a society that approved of violence against women; that making abortion illegal was simply a sanctimonious, self-righteous form of violence against women- it was just another way of legalizing violence against women, Nurse Caroline would say.

Grant us safe lodging, and holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at last.” Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the Saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.