Oh, Meg, you are a moron, Calvin said. Don't you know you're the nicest thing that's happened to me in a long time?

We want nothing from you that you do without grace," Mrs Whatsit said, "or that you do without understanding.

It's a stage we all go through; it takes a certain amount of living to strike the strange balance between the two errors either of regarding ourselves as unforgivable or as not needing forgiveness.

Expand my love, Lord, so I can help to bear the pain, help your love move my love into the tired prostitute with false eyelashes and bunioned feet, the corrupt policeman with his hand open for graft, the addict, the derelict, the woman in the mink coat and discontented mouth, the high school girl with heavy books and frightened eyes. Help me through these scandalous particulars to understand your love. Help me to pray.

I'll ask you a riddle. What do you have the more of, the more of it you give away?

The obligations of normal human kindness—chesed, as the Hebrew has it—that we all owe. But there's a kind of vanity in thinking you can nurse the world. There's a kind of vanity in goodness.

Only a human being can say I'm sorry. Forgive me. This is part of our particularity. It is part of what makes us capable of tears, capable of laughter.

Where there is an unreconciled quarrel, everybody suffers

To keep a warm heart in a cold world is the real victory.

Even though men and women are different in our thinking, we all share the need and desire for compassion, compliments, and companionship.

Just as white light consists of colored rays, so reverence for life contains all the components of ethics: love, kindliness, sympathy, empathy, peacefulness and power to forgive.

The world does not understand theology or dogma, but it understands love and sympathy.