My mind couldn't fit itself around the shape of his absence.

Grief made fools of us all. There was shock in it, but there could hardly be surprise.

The high domed ceiling put me in mind of a skull, a brain, a mind. What did that make us, the readers?

Learning to trust is one of life's most difficult tasks.

A popular song is one that makes us all think we can sing.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

For a man learns more quickly and remembers more easily that which he laughs at, than that which he approves and reveres.

What fools indeed we morals are to lavish care upon a car, with never a bit of time to see about our own machinery!

I wanted to be a nun. I saw nuns as superstars. When I was growing up I went to a Catholic school, and the nuns, to me, were these superhuman, beautiful, fantastic people.

There is a point at which we begin to receive a diminishing return on the accumulation of sacred knowledge unless we use it to at least try to improve the world.

What [software] must not do is not the inverse of what it must do. .

This is one of the great paradoxes of suffering. Those who don't suffer much think suffering should keep people from God, while many who suffer a great deal turn to God, not from him.

Suffering dispels the illusion that we have the strength and competence to rule our own lives and save ourselves.