If he had given away anything else, he would have been charged with indecent exposure.

Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe—with charity—that there is still room for Hope.

When I returned home soon afterwards, it was with a newly awakened sense of what Australian literature was good for: helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance.

His face frankly displays his suffering, expressing it with a truly royal simplicity. At such moments even the very best people are apt to give themselves away with the kind of look which says to you more or less directly: 'You see how I'm sticking it out; don't praise me, it's my nature; thanks all the same.' But the Curé de Torcy looks straight at you, guilelessly. His eyes beg your compassion and sympathy. But with what nobility they beg! A king might beg in just that way.

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.

Everyone agrees the celibacy rule is just a Church law dating from the 11th century, not a divine command.