“How can you expect a statue to offer you food, if it cannot even save itself from the rain and cold?”

“Sometimes, as much as writing saves one’s own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another’s. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is food, the kind a soul needs.”

“Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.”

“How can you expect obedience from the men when officers are corrupt?”

“I just don’t see how anyone can be so cold. (Kiara)
And you should be grateful, little girl, to whatever god you worship, that you can say that. In the world we come from, I don’t understand how anyone can be anything but cold. (Syn)”

“You cannot save people, you can only love them.”

“How would you expect to find community while you intentionally withdraw from it at some point? The disobedient cannot believe; only the obedient believe.”

“Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless youit can.”

“Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.”

“It cannot therefore be true that images are the textbooks of laypersons. For they are unable to learn their salvation from them. … How can you save lay persons when you ascribe to images the power which God gave to his word alone?”