“The mute boy padded over and sat by the Abbess’s feet. Sunlite bent around the world, lending fragile color to wildflowers.”

[I]f [the author] makes [his readers] well — that is, makes them see what they have never seen before, moves them into a new order of perception and experience altogether — he finds his reward in the peers he has created.

Holy Writ by the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery.

…in Africa — you know, that strange continent which serves as the subconscious of our planet — where we’ve found the earliest remains of man…Who knows what lurks in the secret breast of that Continent, shaped so like the human skull?

The Pope looked at Drag in disgust. One should always believe the other side is capable of doing anything it says — you’re a young country and you don’t know that but you’ll learn — the hard way.

As they say, or as he use to say when he tried to con the farmers, pretending he was one of their own, “as ye sow so shall ye reap.”

The Amazons preferred their own thing. It was a big world wasn’t it? And who cared as long as no one starved and everybody could swing the way he wanted.

When Nathan first slept in the family’s heirloom, his fear was of falling off. His first serious boyfriend also admitted it scared him, and they broke up soon after he tumbled out one evening. Nathan ascribed no connection to either event. Most people who have used the bed take time adjusting to its height. Not only can a fall be serious, but, stepping out in the middle of the night for a drink of water or a trip to the bathroom, one had to probe with a foot and slide down the mattress, difficult when semiconscious in the dark. Instead of a mountaineer, one was a spelunker looking for the bottom, searching for secure footing.

Nathan hardly ever slipped anymore.

Thus I came up out of Egypt and stood before Sinai, and a power divine touched my spirit and gave it sight, so that I beheld many wonders. And from the sacred mountain I heard a voice which said, “Knowledge is love and light and vision.”

Great poetry, whether written in Greek or in English, needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart.

Once, when I was puzzled to know why there were so many religions, [Bishop Brooks] said, “There is one universal religion, Helen — the religion of love. Love your Heavenly Father with your whole heart and soul, love every child of God as much as you ever can, and remember that the possibilities of good are greater than the possibilities of evil; and you have the key to Heaven.”

“It makes me feel more alone to think I had kids, and they went off,” she said. She spoke with dignity, slowly, choosing her words. All the television broadcasts had made her conscious of words; she might have been speaking on television. “But I think, what the hell, everybody is alone. That’s the secret, everybody is alone and can’t help it, like right here and now, in this place, everybody is alone and they’d all get up and walk out if they could and never see each other again. We’re all like that.”

AIDS, it has been discovered, is a plague of absence. Absence opened in the blood. Absence condensed into the fluid of passing emotion.

Joyce Carol Oates, from Them:

Of his hours spent in bed dreaming, his hours at work, the way in which he put on his shoes – no one cares – though these things are closer to the heart of the real Jules than his delerium of love. For love, being a delerium and a pathological condition, makes of the lover a crazed man; his blood leaps with bacteria that shoot the temperature up toward death. The real Jules, a cunning boy with a sweet look about him, was drenched and overcome by the sweat of the crazed Jules, a Jules in love.

Nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

The eyes of God – maybe those eyes are blind – I never let myself think that before.