“I would not say I was a nonbeliever; rather, that I gave little if any thought to celestial concerns. It did not seem to me that God, whoever he was, would be the sort of god to take an interest in...”

“I wanted to kill them. No, not kill. "Kill" is too dull a word for that which I desired. I wanted to annihilate them. I wanted to tear them limb from limb. I wanted to crack their bones and bury my...”

“The heart, once broken, stayed broken.”

“Consider the species known as man. We lie, we cheat, we want what others have and take it; we make war upon each other and the earth; we harvest lives in multitude. We have mortgaged the planet and...”

“It's children, he thought, that give us our lives; without them we are nothing, we are here and then gone, like the dust.”

“For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.”

“It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.”

“Absolution is the washing away of sin. The promise of rebirth. And the chance to escape the transgressions of those who came before us. The best among us will learn from the mistakes of the past, w...”

“I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies ...”

“Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean.”

“Dont cry and dont rage. Understand.”

“The only way to heal yourself was to understand. Understand the love or the hate or the cowardice, or the impulsiveness, the lack of will of the one who hurt you--the circumstances that twisted the...”