“Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.”

“My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He’d grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED. When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived. At our one local movie theater, blacks and whites had to sit apart—the blacks in the balcony. My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals, and to respect the religious views of our friends, whatever they were. My brother’s best friend was black, and when they went to the movies, Neil sat with him in the balcony. My mother always taught us: “Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you,” and “Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are.” Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.” My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.” Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.”

“Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.”

“Satan is masterful at using just enough of God’s truth to capture a person’s attention and then mix it with his devious potion that will lead [believers] astray.”

“As Pat Riley, the basketball coach, said, "Anytime you stop striving to get better, you're bound to get worse.”

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”

“When you aspire to inspire before you expire, you conspire to inspire even after you pause to respire. Keep pushing it!”

“There are two aspects," Alexey Alexandrovitch resumed: "those who take part and those who look on; and love for such spectacles is an unmistakable proof of a low degree of development in the spectator, I admit, but . . .”

“The consequences of giving up on your dreams are bitter than the causes of your intentions to give up. Don’t give up!”

“If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.”

“If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development.”

“When the emotion of romance is added to those of love and sex, the obstructions between the finite mind of man and Infinite Intelligence are removed.”

“Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand.”

“Aslan's instructions always work; there are no exceptions.”

“By faith in [Jesus] we can be forgiven of our sins and know the joy of following Him every day.”