The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.

Among the tastemakers and power brokers and intellectual agenda setters of late-twentieth-century America, orthodox Christianity was completely déclassé.

And it's the 'Word of God' that turns the rocks in the mouth to loaves on the tongue. That fills our emptiness with the true and real good, 'that makes the eyes see', the body full of light.

I like peasants-they are not sophisticated enough to reason speciously.

I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.

We are like a wishing well And a bolt of electricity

Those who are slow to know suppose that slowness is the essence of knowledge.

There is something sadly wrong when it is more important to us whether others are a part of our denomination, rather than whether they repent of sin, believe on Christ and live holy lives.

I like to remind myself, as a parent, that God holds me responsible to, not for, my children!

Octavia Butler, of course, is brilliant and disturbing.

Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction.

Music is what our feelings sound like.