Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.

Anyone can be sentimental about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer." “If you don’t believe in Easter,” Owen Meany said. “Don’t kid yourself—Don’t call yourself a Christian.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

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.

He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.

You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.

He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.