What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? … What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around...

he had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.

The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne’s are worth asking. To ask...

How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?

In the North, he discoverd, courtesy was considered a barometer of genuine esteem; for any decently brought up Southerner, good manners were simply habitual.

I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist....

Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.

Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I’m presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.

There are times…when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy...

Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.

Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction and many go that way

He’s not a bad guy, John. It’s human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn’t have made, some flaw in me that he didn’t share, so he could believe...

She was alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage. By an eight-hundred-year-old Sepahrdic tradition she ad been since the age of twelve and a half “bogeret l’reshut nafsha”–an adult wit authority over her...

The new fashions sold in departmentstores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see.They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittancein terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industrythat...

Writing my own novels in the ’90s…I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.

And she laughed, a full octave, descending from high C like chimes.

[John] watched the flames for a while. “I would have to say that I find God in serving His children. ‘When I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me...

As many as thirty or as few as ten years later, lying exhausted and still, eyes open in the dark long after the three suns of Rakhat had set, no longer bleeding, past the vomiting,...

When it comes down to it, I don’t have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is: Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who’s selling...

For he had never heard anything like it–did not know such music existed in the world–and it was hard to believe that a man he knew could play it with his own two hands. There...

When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering,...

The poor you will always have with you,’ Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?

Shall I tell you why young men love war? . . . In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one question with one right answer. ....

Once I told Ha�anala about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. . . . I told her how Abraham bargained with God for the lives of ten righteous men who might have lived there. She...

Later that summer, as rain fell, such a moment shimmered and paused on the brink, and then began the ancient dance of numbers: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and a new life took root and...

we all make vows, Jimmy. And there is something very beautiful and touching and noble about wanting good impulses to be permanent and true forever,” she said. “Most of us stand up and vow to...

Tradition was safety; change was danger.

God’s got a lot of explaining to do. Of course, God never explains. When life breaks your heart, you’re just supposed to pick up the pieces and start all over, I guess.