“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)”

“Prayer [is] the quiet, persistent living of our life of desire and faith in the presence of our God.”

“Hans clacked his side-lips. “Do you have the sentence in your head that tomorrow’s procession will halt this pest of yours, that it will bar the small-lives from the High Woods?””If it is as you say, no. No more than prayer can stay a charging horse. But that is not why we pray. God is no cheap juggler as to play for a pfennig.”

“No Temple made by mortal human hands can ever compare to the Temple made by the gods themselves. That building of wood and stone that houses us and that many believe conceals the great Secret Temple from prying eyes, somewhere in its heart of hearts, is but a decoy for the masses who need this simple concrete limited thing in their lives. The real Temple is the whole world, and there is nothing as divinely blessed as a blooming growing garden.”

“We must never forget to pray, and to ask God to remember us when He is arranging things, so that we too may feel safe and have no anxiety about what is going to happen.”

“Prayer at its highest is a two-way conversation-and for me the most important part is listening to God’s replies.”

“God, I am trying to recover my faith. Please don’t abandon me in the middle ofthis adventure, I prayed, pushing my fears aside.”

“When God has specially promised the thing, we are bound to believe we shall recieve it when we pray for it. You have no right to put in an ‘if’, and say, ‘Lord, if it be thy will…” This is to insult God. To put an ‘if’ in God’s promise when God has put none there, is tantamount to charging God with being insincere.”

“A prayer is a chat with thy God.”

“God is a person, and his universe reflects his personhood. The closer something is to the character of God, the more it reflects him and the less it can be measured. Things such as integrity, beauty, hope, and love are all in the same category as prayer. You can tell their presence and even describe them, but you can’t define them, simply because they are too close to God’s image.”

“Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming. Everything you do affects those you love. All of life is covenant.Imbedded in the idea of prayer is a richly textured view of the world where all of life is organized around invisible bonds or covenants that knit us together. Instead of a fixed world, we live in our Father’s world, a world built for divine relationships between people where, because of the Good News, tragedies become comedies and hope is born.”

“Meditating on the nature and dignity of prayer can cause saying at least one thing to God: Lord, teach us to pray!”

“Keep on the watch and pray”

“Loving someone is waking up a little bit earlier than they do so you can pray for their day.”

“Since the beginning of the world, a prayer is a prayer and a curse is a curse– no matter the people– no matter the language– Man has given a thousand different namesto his god, but look into the face of each one– long enough– hard enough– You will find one truth.”