And so Rebecca consigned herself to, not ignorance, but a judicious incuriosity: she decided, for the time being, to live with the constant, cryptic reminders that the scope of another person's soul could never be fully surveyed.

Why "revere" the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?

The secret belongs only to the Maker of good and faithful dogs.

I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.

Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts. And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings.

It is natural that people should differ most, and most violently, about the unknowable . . . There is all the room in the world for divergence of opinion about something that, so far as we can realistically perceive, does not exist.

I wanted to buy a T-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWABLE.

It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.

Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.