For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

We'll do what life always does defy expectations.