They'd put the anesthesia mask on him, and the next instant he was in the recovery room. It was a blackout so complete, it made him doubt the immortality of the soul.

I'd left them because I'd loved them. Beth and my parents and my friends and my life-my free, American life. I loved them, and if I had a chance to protect them from the people who wanted to destroy them then I had to take that chance even if it meant I would never see them again.

You know what it's like," said Storm, "when you want to--just--pour a woman into a glass and--just-drink her--just drink her down, one gulp, body and soul?

The world had no beauty of its own. The beauty of the world was created in the human experience, in me. The very fact of beauty, the very idea that something could be beautiful, only existed in me. The point was not to see the world....The point was to experience the world.

Anyway, God is not susceptible to proofs and disproofs. If you believe, the evidence is all around you. If you don’t believe, no evidence can be enough.

The world always seems like it's going to hell when you're depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That's what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues.

A rock is harder than a feather, you can talk and jabber and make exceptions, but in the end, if you have to choose which one is gonna hit you on the head, you'll choose the feather every single time.

Alex got angry at me because he said I didn’t understand how hard it was. And you know what? He was right. I didn’t understand. Not then.

And the air--I don't know how to describe it exactly--it had that strange cool spring feeling in it, that feeling as if you remember something wonderful but you're not quite sure what it is.

Maybe real-life Mom didn't vacuum the house flawlessly arrayed in pearls and a pleated shirt like the mother on leave it to beaver. Maybe she flirted with the milkman or waited for the kids to go to bed so she could hammer back a couple of mugs of vodka pretending it was tea. But she was there to greet us when we came home from school in the afternoon. She made us dinner, kept watch on us through the kitchen window, put Band-Aids on our scrapes and bruises. She was Mom and that was no small thing.

There's a school of thought today that rejects patriotism. People are made nervous by that intense allegiance to a country. They think it can only lead to war and bloodshed and that fights can be avoided if we all just compromise and get along. And, of course, compromise and getting along are great things as long as you're not sacrificing essential values. But I believe there's a line in the sand, some things that you have to be willing to stand up for, even if it means trouble. Charlie's patriotism is not blind, flag-waving jingoism: it's an intense allegiance to the American concept of liberty. He's through and through. He can talk about it and explain it. And he's shown he's willing to give everything for it. I admire him for that.

North," said the face beneath the sheet. "I belong to the National Association of Broadcasting Employees and Technicians. If you wake me up before I've slept twelve hours, I get paid short turnaround.""But Rose--""If you wake me up before seven hours, I get to push a screwdriver into your l

With effort he opened his eyes again. Was someone there with him in the dusk? Yes. Someone was standing above him, looking down at him. Tom squinted, trying to see through the gloom. Then he realized: no. It was only the scorched painting on the wall. Those painted eyes with the line of blood trickling down beside them. 'Bad day,' he thought up at them. 'It seems I've been murdered.' 'Yes,' responded the eyes at once. 'That happens sometimes when you insist on telling the truth. People don't always appreciate it.' 'It's not so bad really,' Tom told the eyes. 'Maybe I'll get to see you in heaven.' 'The road to heaven isn't death, Tommy. It's life.' Tom peered up at the eyes through the growing darkness. He thought he saw the whole painting recovered in its frame: Christ crucified, the rivulets of blood streaming down from under his crown of thorns. 'But you died.' Tom said to him. 'You died and went to heaven.' 'No,' the eyes answered. 'I lived. That's the whole point. I lived. And now you have to live, Tom.

If there's one thing every good novelist understands, it's that our inner world is unreliable and yet there's no getting beyond it. Every sense is subject to deception, including the moral sense. What seems at first like the hard surface of spiritual reality is really fathomless when you dive down into it. There is no bottom. We neve know anything for sure. (p. xvi)

I'm a professional journalist. Making up lies to fit the facts - it's what we do.