“What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?”

“Max would conclude, "that's who I want to be. The pope. And I'll do the same thing he does. I'll keep all the goddamn money.”

“Hed meant to forgive his brother, maybe even imagined he had. Hed also meant to learn to trust him, but instead merely fell into the habit of waiting for him to fuck up again.”

“Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more c...”

“One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers hes made by not really making them.”

“To his surprise he...discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at somethingthat you cared about a great deal.”

“It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you.It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled.It's not a weakness.It's your best strength.”

“No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.”

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

“Generally, there is a lot of truth value in stepping back, observing, then logically generalizing the extremes of what you see.”

“Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment...”

“Generally, there is a lot of truth value in stepping back, observing, then logically generalizing the extremes of what you see.”