“I suspect you're thinking of Pascal,' Finkler said, finally.'Only he said the opposite. He said you might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn't exist, you've nothing to lose. Wh...”

“A waitress, bringing Finkler more hot water, interrupted Treslove's answer. Finkler always asked for more hot water no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of assertin...”

“You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance.”

“If that made him heavy company sometimes, so be it. Who decreed that life was to be one long rowdy masquerade (punctuated with those little pets of melancholy indulged by a crowd who made a religio...”

“How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you...”

“to bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we...”

“I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the me...”

“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”

“Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.”

“Some people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said."Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”

“I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don...”

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

“There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.”

“I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.”

“It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of...”