The effect of the rupture that sin created in the relationship between the man and the woman is this: mistrust, anger, and disappointment became the standard quality of human life. Even

I am fallen, flawed and imperfect. Yet drenched in the grace and mercy. That is found in Jesus Christ, there is strength. God's mercy and grace give me hope, for myself, and for our world.

One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin.

And when Hightower approaches, the smell of plump unwashed flesh and unfresh clothing--that odor of unfastidious sedentation, of static overflesh not often enough bathed--is well nigh overpowering. [...] It is the odor of goodness. Of course it would smell bad to us that are bad and sinful.

I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is NOT the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.

The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.

I don't believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago!.

The happiest person in the world has struggled. And none of us are perfect. And people can judge. There's so much judgment going on. And I just don't think that's what God's about.

I sometimes wonder how people like Bart, who no longer believe in the grace of God, handle their guilt. Perhaps, as Sigmund Freud suggested, they repress it by burying the memories of past sins deep within themselves. But Freud went on to explain that such repression doesn't really work in the long run, and that guilt always emerges from the subconscious, sometimes as phobias and sometimes as neurotic behavior.