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ad majorem Dei gloriam: for the greater glory of God.
Cunctando regitur mundus: Waiting, one conquers all.
Non mea voluntas sed Tua fiat, he thought. He was prepared to do as he was bidden.
launched into a good-natured dispute over the moral distinction between lying to children and stand-up comedy.
your program is going to claim it’s found intelligent life on Mars. And everyone knows there’s only Australians there, right?”
someplace where you could fall asleep on the sofa.”
“Aren’t you splendid!” Anne cried delightedly. Emilio often did exactly that. “Oh, Sofia, that is so much nicer than thinking it’s just a plain mess!”
Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.
He couldna poured water out a boot if the instructions was on the heel.
“It’s just that, until you’ve been there, you can’t know what it’s like to hold yourself to promises you made in good faith a long time ago. Do you hang in there, or cut your losses? Soldier on, or admit defeat and try to make the best of things?” She’d looked a little sheepish then and admitted,
Jimmy, I honestly don’t know if the world would be better or worse if we all held ourselves to the vows of our youth.”
Deus vult, pater. God wanted him dead,
plume of sweetly camphoric enzyme by-products giving off notes of basil and tarragon, by chocolate aromatics, sugar carbonyl and pyrazine compounds carrying the suggestion of vanilla, by hints of nutmeg and celery seed and cumin in the products of dry distillation created during roasting. And, overlaying all, the tenuous odor of volatile short-chain carbons, the saline memorial of an alien ocean: sweat from the fingers of Emilio Sandoz.
smell of coffee and person's sweat
“The goal of every engineer is to retire without getting blamed for a major catastrophe.”
“Cubs fan,” John muttered. The Chicagoan’s curse. Sandoz pushed a towel aside, eyes wide. “How bad?” “Anybody can have a couple of lousy centuries.” “I guess. Wow.” Sandoz let the towel fall back into place. There was a thoughtful silence. “Well, that explains why Giuliani brought you over.” Suddenly John heard the Father General’s voice saying: “Voelker, I need someone to take care of a hopeless wreck coming back from Rakhat. Get me a Cubs fan!”
‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’ ” “But the sparrow still falls,” Felipe said.
Until I read this, I wondered about the title
Old joke. Three Catholic priests are having dinner: a Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit. Suddenly the lights go out. The Franciscan says, “Let us welcome Sister Darkness and wait patiently for Brother Sunlight to return.” The Dominican says, “God gives us the darkness of ignorance so that we might, by contrast, discern the light of truth.” The Jesuit finds a flashlight and goes downstairs to flip the breaker.
I tried not to dwell on technical details of my fictional future because characters in books shouldn’t stop to marvel at things that are ordinary in their world.
1989, political economist Francis Fukuyama famously declared “the end of history.” The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was over, and he believed that liberal capitalist democracy had won.
a growing “Common Marketization” of international relations and the diminution of large-scale conflicts between states. I was not entirely persuaded that international trade would prevent nations from killing their customers; the very same logic for permanent peace was advanced by the Englishman Norman Angell and the German Wilhelm Bölsche in 1913, just before all hell broke loose in Europe.
In the meantime, commercialization of space has begun. Property rights were extended beyond Earth by the U.S. Space Act of 2015, which states that any resource taken from an asteroid becomes the property of the business entity that extracts it.
When you convert to Judaism in a post-Holocaust world, you know two things for sure: one is that being Jewish can get you killed; the other is that God won’t rescue you.
The beauty of religion is the way in which it enriches your understanding of what your senses tell you. I see no conflict between scientific and religious thought. They are just two very different ways of interpreting what we see all around
The risks have to do with believing that God micromanages the world, and with seeing what may be simply coincidence as significant and indicative of divine providence. It’s very easy then to go out on a limb spiritually, expect more from God than you have a right to expect, and set yourself up for bitter disappointment in His silence and lack of action.
What’s the hardest thing about using two narrative lines to tell a story? MDR: Pacing. You have to stop and think, Who does the reader want to be with now? Some time ago I realized the books that kept me turning pages were the ones that had two or more story lines. It’s a structure I admired as a reader. As a writer, having two story lines proved to be of great value. When I played out my imagination in one story line I could take a break from it and turn to the other with fresh enthusiasm. The tricky part is in introducing two separate sets of characters in the first one hundred pages.
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The main thing to remember is that writing happens by doing the writing.
What’s the moral of this story? MDR: Maybe it’s “Even if you do the best you can, you still get screwed.” We seem to believe that if we act in accordance with our understanding of God’s will, we ought to be rewarded. But in doing so we’re making a deal that God didn’t sign on to.
God gives us rules but those are rules for us, not for God.
That you can’t know the answer to questions of faith but that the questions are worth asking and worth thinking about deeply.
