“I'd always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands.”

“We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them - they would never sense the lack or even know there was someth...”

“How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed.”

“I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board.”

“But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne's face looked as she watched him - I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they...”

“She must have already forgiven him for leaving her behind. Girls were good at colouring in those disappointing blank spots. I thought of the night before, her exaggerated moans.”

“There are two types of seeds in the mind: those that create anger, fear, frustration, jealousy, hatred and those that create love, compassion, equanimity and joy. Spirituality is germination and sp...”

“My music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me - the humiliation of it - as a soprano.These, by contrast, are...”

“If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you're allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.”

“Here's an easy way to figure out if you're in a cult: If you're wondering whether you're in a cult, the answer is yes.”

“The Supreme Cult never leaves a man. It never gets destroyed or evaporated. It is Gods grace and it is sure to bear fruit in its own time.”

“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.”

“The basic religious idea in all patriarchal religions is the negation of the sexual needs. Only in very primitive religions were religiosity and sexuality identical. When social organization passed...”

“Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.”

“Professor Langdon,' called a young man with curly hair in the back row, 'if Masonry is not a secret society, not a corporation, and not a religion, then what is it?''Well, if you were to ask a Maso...”