a leap of faith, as Sara had once assured him, was never from Point A to Point B. A leap of faith was from Point A.

It was a cinch, he thought, to be a leader of men. All you had to do was find a good story and tell it whenever the occasion arose.

“People have so goddam much to walk away from. Every time I find myself wondering what we’re walking toward, I tell myself that’s beside the point.

You know that line, ‘It’s a lousy job but somebody has to do it’? If it’s really a lousy job, then nobody has to do it.”

“When you judge anyone you judge yourself. When you seek to punish anyone you are seeking to punish yourself. What you fear in others you fear in yourself.”

“There’s no order of difficulty in miracles. They’re all impossible. You can’t divide them into major and minor miracles.

He seemed to have given up deciding things, he realized. It looked as though the only way for him to find out what he was going to do was to wait and see what he did.

“If the others always have you for a leader, they’ll miss finding leadership within themselves. And we need plenty of leaders.”

“Poor Mark,” Lissa said after she’d left. “To think that all along he had this great gift for rubbing necks, and he wasted all those years wringing them.”