"Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel’s childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and the triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossing and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal."

“Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorizes as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.”

“Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.”

“I realized that for this moment, nothing in the past mattered. Nothing terrible in the future mattered. What mattered was her skin against me, her hand holding me, the perfume of her hair and skin and the warmth of her breath against my chest. This was satori. This was truth.”

“Have you considered that these prophecies were not divine revelations, but merely manipulation from some secular power?”

“Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity.”

““I am of no faith,” said Aenea. “If one defines faith as belief in the supernatural.”