“Now when the doors at the back of the church swung open, and she fixed her eyes on Thomas, and saw him standing there upright, in a stern gladness, she felt like she was looking down on him from the top of an emerald cloud of joy that surrounded that rainbow in John’s apocalypse. The brilliant notes of the organ’s glory had swirled down the aisle toward the back of the church and washed around her feet like an incoming tide . . . As she advanced down the aisle, Savannah knew herself to be beautiful, and there was no conceit in it anywhere, for the beauty belonged to another entirely. She was the glory of another. Her head was waiting for her at the front of the church, a dear, kind man. But she was not approaching him as though he were a head in need of feet; rather, her waiting head was bare and needed a crown.”
All in a Shoebox
“Sex, the way God established it at the very beginning, rules . . . The ancient poet Horace put it with some force when he said Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret, which puts the whole thing into a shoebox. “You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back again.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, p. xi
As Those Guys Are Tough Customers
“The groom’s eye was much better, meaning that Mrs. Fuller no longer thought he looked like the chaplain on a pirate ship.”
Which Is Not That Common
“She was Jael, wife of Heber, and she had done it with a parasol.”
A Hurricane of Gladness
“She had been wise in her own conceits, and now she felt all those conceits blowing like straws in a tornado. She was the straw, in a hurricane of grace.”
He Loves Them More Than We Do
“God plainly loves cliffhangers, and that is what this most certainly is.”
A Difficult Spot
“He resented that God had created him without his permission, and he resented that he had no God to resent.”
Like a Good Conscience
“After my conscience rose from the dead, it wasn’t even acting sick.”
Angels Unawares
“There was a preacher there, though, standing on the end of a watering trough outside a saloon. He did not have much of the love of God about him, he looked like nothing on earth, and he was full of hatred for sin.”
The Majesty of the Law
“The judge, Jeffrey Chalmers, was a big man in every sense of the word. He was three-hundred pounds, but tall and muscular, about six and a half feet, and he had bushy eyebrows, and a fierce mustache. When he had his robe on, and was up behind that mahogany bench, he was visibly formidable. Not all the defendants who came before him would plead guilty, but all of them wanted to.”