“God answered prayers first by teaching the need to ask, second by using friends as holy messengers.”

“Alex had cooked, and coaxed, and helped Mark form borders around the shapeless days. Alex had given meaning to the word "servant".”

“For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.”

“Normal Iraqi etiquette was forgotten the moment drivers sat behind the wheel.”

“His eyes touched lightly, and passed on.”

“He used a minimum of words and no inflection whatsoever. It was a policeman's manner of speaking, direct and unadorned.”

“Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more complet...”

“All this wondering was the weather vane on top of the building of unrest and of discontent”

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”

“What would behoove me to instantly declare God not to be God unless He followed my script in some tediously exacting manner? I must confess that I am less likely to believe that its a matter of som...”

“What in the world would ever lead to me believe that life is a series of opportunities that are readily available to everyone else but me? What really leads me to believe such an atrocious lie is t...”

“To look beyond our horizons is to acknowledge that weve hemmed ourselves in by creating them in the first place.”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”