“Sadie," he said forlornly, "when you become a parent, you may understand this. One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own goals and wishes, are secondary to my children's.”

“One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq with the war on terror.”

“Even if I'm following the path my parents set, I need to take my own dreams and beliefs with me.”

“I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and realized my head was in Khufu’s lap. The baboon was foraging my scalp for munchies.
“Dude.” I sat up groggily. “Not cool.”
“But he gave you a lovely hairdo,” Sadie said.
“Agh-agh!” Khufu agreed.”

“My prayer is simple my dear one, my dear one. May you never need understand. My prayer is for peacetime, my child, my child. Live it well and this life can be grand.”

“I see you looking at my cookies,' my father said to Morelli. 'Don't even think about it. Go get your own cookies.”

“If I am truly to become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian… I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.”

“All men are my children. What I desire for my own children, and I desire their welfare and happiness both in this world and the next, that I desire for all men. You do not understand to what extent I desire this, and if some of you do understand, you do not understand the full extent of my desire.”

“I learned the right way to live from my parents. I never heard any hate in my house. I never heard my father say a mean word to my mother, or my mother to my father, either. During the war, when food was hard to get, my parents fed their children first and they ate what was left. They always thought of us.”

“Toward dawn, he dreamed that he was in hiding, in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. What are you looking for? a librarian wearing dark glasses asked him. I'm looking for God, Hladik replied. God, the librarian said, is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes in the Clementine. My parents and my parents' parents searched for that letter; I myself have gone blind searching for it.”