That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.

I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.

Limitation is a good discipline because it discourages inappropriate generalization, which distracts attention from the profound, particular complexity that characterizes anything at all.

It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.

Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.

It is hardship that makes clear who the "fighters" are.