You do not base your belief that Jesus is the Saviour from sin upon the fact that somebody is saved, or says he is saved; but you base it upon the Word of the living God; and there you stand.

There are many Christians who are Christians in theory only, and they are worldlings in practice.

God help me now to preach the Word to all the dying around, and tell them how.

I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.

Everything you love also loves you.

Ours is an overpopulated, under educated, shithole in the throes of mass extinctions - it's a wonderful world.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

If a boy, if a man, asks you if you're all right and you say yes, he'll always believe you and get on with what he wants to do. It's just the way they're made.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets - and oh how we squander those moments.

"I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies-a cypress age, a Sawtooth age-I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.

I'm always perversely attracted to characters that seem one thing, but are ultimately revealed as another...