Relationships are never chance events.

Sometimes when you push someone, you find out who that person really is.

The roots of any evil deed can be traced to the perpetrator's refusal to experience pain.

But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly.

A jealous husband is an ugly thing.

God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces, which is why sharing pain freely feels very much like love, and may be the same thing. (207)

We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war.