Great Throughts Treasury

"The sins that we should hate most are not those of our neighbor but our own. These are the only sins over which god has given us immediate power."

"Prayer is God’s own psychotherapy for His sinful children. It is His method of uncovering unconscious motivations and of recalling to consciousness those thins which have been excluded as painful and humiliating."

"I would say that, from childhood, my most pertinent literary influences remain Sherlock Holmes on the one hand and Roald Dahl on the other. These are mixed in the stew of my authorial unconscious with an unhealthily large dose of post-structuralist readings from college. What comes out—well, I will let others describe that particular concoction."

"Though literary seems too exalted a term. I read constantly—at the dinner table, in class, in bed, on the school bus. I read whenever and wherever I could—and often whenever and wherever I shouldn’t. As to what I read, the answer is everything. From the aforementioned Holmes and Dahl to Ursula Le Guin and J.R.R. Tolkien. And was that me reading Little Women and Little House on the Prairie on the bench at lunchtime when the other boys were playing kickball?? Er...yes, it was."

"To fall in love with God is the greatest of all romances; to seek him, the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement."