“It was a wonderful life. To have a stage play right in this room, with real people acting real parts.”

“In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“While most people took family for granted, he [Father Tim] took it for grace.”

“Why can't life always be lived under the stars,' she said, 'with great music and family and friends?”

“... for fog was merely a cloud that wasn't too smitten with itself to visit terra firma.”

“Professor Morgan had called [Dooley] 'a lad of few words.' That wasn't true. There were words spilling around in him all the time. Too many words. His problem was organizing them.”

“Whole worlds darkness is not enough to dark the blaze of a candle..”

“The garden shimmered with candlelight from dozens of sweetly scented beeswax tapers set around to illuminate the space. In the center stood her painting table, now neatly draped in a crisp, white l...”

“This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.”

“...I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday - the longer, the better - from the great boarding-school, where we are for...”

“He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of ho...”

“The Christmas presents once opened are Not So Much Fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them. Three hundred sixty-five days late...”

“Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a co...”

“Holiness is as much about what you do on a Monday morning on the factory floor as it is about what you do on a Sunday morning in a church gathering. Holiness is as much about the kind of neighbour ...”

“Liturgy gathers the holy community as it reads the Holy Scriptures into the sweeping tidal rhythms of the church year in which the story of Jesus and the Christian makes its rounds century after ce...”