The Source: A Novel

She was reluctant to think that the moral structure of a town could determine the kind of people who lived therein, but that appeared to be the case.

And so as Muslim troops approached from the east on that mighty conquest which would terminate the power of Byzantium in the Galilee, the citizens of that contentious area continued their bitter arguments over the nature of Christ, not realizing that they were engaged in an extension of the same argument that had agitated Makor in the days when the

Humbly the Roman asked, ‘Then what is the law?’ And Gimzo said quietly, ‘It’s doing the best we can to ascertain God’s intention, for there were indeed two men on a roof, and they did climb down the same chimney. The first man emerged completely clean while it was the second who was covered with soot, and neither man washed his face, because you fo

“A man is never old if he can still be moved emotionally by a woman of his own age.”

A man who laughs is more to be cherished than one who weeps; a woman who sings, than one who wails. And God is very close to the child who dances for reasons which he cannot explain.”

Symphonies and cathedrals are not built by the children of upper-middle-class families. They’re built by the units we saw tonight. You need these people very much, Cullinane, but we can’t spare them and you’re too frightened to take them.”

It is ironic that I should now be imprisoned in this temple, but if it is true that each man in this life builds his own prison, and inhabits it the way crawling fish inhabit shells along the beach at Caesarea, then I have built for myself an exquisite jail, exactly suited to the kind of man I have always wanted to be.

“El has no home, for he is everywhere.” This simple idea reached Timna’s inquisitive mind like sunshine after storm, like a rainbow after a fall of cold rain. She recognized Joktan’s explanation as the concept she had been groping for: a solitary god of no form, residing in no monolith, with no specific voice.

It was instructive and accurate to imagine earliest man as living for most of his first two million years within an insulation of stupidity, not fully differentiating himself from the physical world, the spiritual world, or the world of the other sentient animals.