You don't have to stop thinking and asking questions to believe in God, child. If He'd wanted a flock of eight billion sheep, He wouldn't have given us opposable thumbs, much less free will.

I figure if there is a God, She's good and surged right now about the state of things down here.

She prayed for that all through the night, uncertain to Whom or what, but with a feeling that almost resembled faith.

To be touched with love was a kind of miracle.

She'd crossed into a place where truth, even if it was brutal, was all she had to offer.

We live in a society that shuns guilt, hardly knows it. It is drummed into us: "Don't feel guilty." No one wants to pay the price of reconciliation, of atonement, of forgiveness.

Serving the emerging whole means paying attention to what's right here within my awareness, what's completely local, and surrendering to what's being asked of me now.

Yes, I will put it out there - I will work for anyone for free if they're prepared to make their clothing Fair Trade and organic. It's really hard to get people interested in it.

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.

Israel has gone mad. It's attacking, doing the same thing to the Palestinian and Lebanese people that they have criticised - and with reason - the Holocaust . But this is a new Holocaust.

God's greatest tragedy is the creation of mankind.

Small yet strong in the love of God, like Saint Francis of Assisi, all of us, as Christians, are called to watch over and protect the fragile world in which we live, and all its peoples.

But anyone can begin. It was the part with all the promise, the potential, the things I loved. More and more, though, I was finding myself wanting to find out what happened in the end.

I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.

No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be.