It was him, it was always him, they only needed to stand there with their feet buried into the muddy moss and look at each other; to feel each other. Time stopped, movement disappeared and it was both the beginning of everything and the end of everything else. They had each other and there was no name, no title to it other than they just had each other. There was no necessity to be practical, what they had and what they were, was of their own and in their own and I think nothing in the world could have made Lucy happier than to have what they had, to be what they were.

Atheists desperately try to prove the non-existence of God using minds - by their own reasoning - that have evolved from a mud that suddenly appeared from nowhere out of nothing made by nobody. And we are told to believe that a Creator hypothesis is unbelievable.

And the news got worse. It appeared that there was this whole other person Jesus Christ whose birthday a lot of people tended to confuse with mine. I was personally outraged. It was a long time before I forgave the Lord for that.

Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched-by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever." (p.33)

"It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator.

"God first appeared on the scene of human history in the role of a matchmaker. What a profound and exciting revelation!

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

From my low perch, I watch the world as it passes by on these dirty side streets. There are no westerners in this corner of the city. Just locals going about their business. Weighing out brightly colored spices, walking back from the fish market, stopping at the paan shop, socializing over tea. Old men in lungis and flip-flops walking hand in hand and dirty-faced children who are all bright smiles and wild eyes. I am comfortable here. Sitting on this board, in this tiny chai stall, hidden away from the recognizable world. For the moment, I have disappeared.

I always thought old age would be a writer's best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory's gone, all the old fluency's disappeared. I don't write a single sentence without saying to myself, 'It's a lie!' So I know I was right. It's the best chance I've ever had.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing-they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Emilio appeared with wine before Cal could say anything, and Min beamed at him, grateful for the rescue. "Emilio, my darling. I forgot to mention cake boxes. Two hundred cake boxes.

You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself

Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

I couldn't stand here, hanging on, when the very thing I held disappeared more with each passing day.

Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same.

Christ appeared alive on several occasions after the cataclysmic events of that first Easter.

I think we lost a great deal of sympathy and support with the way in which the crisis was handled most importantly I think when we appeared to be grasping for too much at one time instead of identifying our priorities in a much more responsible fashion.

I was 21 in 1968 so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies in the West anyway would have seemed absurd in 1968.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary whatever the punishment once a specific crime has appeared for the first time its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

The sun the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

I was myself brought up with my brother whose name was Matthias for he was my own brother by both father and mother and I made mighty proficiency in the improvements of my learning and appeared to have both a great memory and understanding.

What society doesn't realize is that in the past ordinary people respected learning. They respected books and they don't now or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

I still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.