Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

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 .

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

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

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.

I can only imagine the quiet horror that people must endure when they meet me in person.

God could not have given this promise, except from love and grace; therefore it is quite certain his Word will be fulfilled.

Only what coronation is in an earthly way, baptism is in a heavenly way; God's authoritative declaration in material form of a spiritual reality.

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.

The third principle is that any philosophic knowledge is only valuable if it is true or if it works.

Everyone is innocent unless proven otherwise.

To err is human, but to persevere in error is only the act of a fool.

Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.