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Never again, she vowed as she fell asleep, emptied of emotion at last. I will never let this happen to me again. Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.
On my best days, I believe in Him with all my heart.” “And on your worst days?” she had asked that night. “Even if it’s only poetry, it’s poetry to live by, Sofia—poetry to die for,” he told her with quiet conviction. He slouched in his chair for a time, thinking. “Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God.… And when the metaphors fail, we think it’s God who’s failed us!” he cried, grinning crookedly. “Now there’s an idea that buys some useful theological wiggle room!”
you have a young man’s vices. Certainty. Shortsightedness. Contempt for pragmatism.”
“By the time he was forty, he controlled businesses accounting for eighteen percent of Italy’s gross national product, with an annual income greater than Fiat. At forty-two, only a year older than I am now, Domenico Giuliani was the head of an empire with tentacles reaching into the whole of Europe, South Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Americas. An empire larger than Alexander’s—my
You know, I’ve always thought it was a tactical mistake for God to love us in the aggregate, when Satan is willing to make a special effort to seduce each of us separately.”
“Bucatini al dente, grilled scamorza, pizza Margherita, eggplant fritatas
Pain is as real as God. Invisible, unmeasurable, powerful—”
“Maybe when you’re frightened, you can hear God better because you’re listening harder.”
“Yes! Of course! Can you build a wall with a single stone?” she asked. “The sign of a good decision is the multiplicity of reasons for it. If more than one goal is served, then a decision is more likely to be wise—”
“My lady, it was once my belief that when a multiplicity of reasons is sought, the rightness of an act is suspect, that one is trying to justify the unjustifiable.
“THE CHIEF SOURCE OF ALL EVILS TO MAN,” WROTE THE STOIC EPICTETUS, “as well as of baseness and cowardice, is not death but fear of death.”
“The noblest kind of retribution,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “is not to become like your enemy.”
“The safest course,” Seneca taught, “is to tempt fortune rarely.” Which probably ruled out relying on miracles more than once a week.
“Haste in a moment, regrets forever,”
In his own soul, he knew with sudden certainty that it was not rebellion or doubt or even sin that broke God’s heart; it was indifference.
make loneliness a virtue. You call it self-reliance,
You tell yourself you need nothing, that you don’t want anyone in your life ever again—”
She taught them that every soul is a small reflection of God, and that it is wicked to murder because when a life is taken, we lose that unique revelation of God’s nature.”
History and religious literature are both packed with examples indicated that God’s favor brings not wealth and happiness, but agony and torture.
