In a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed. Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.

Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?

Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love.

The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.