Quotes from Julia Spencer-Fleming

The only other person attending who was close to her age was Father St. Laurent, a devastatingly good-looking Roman Catholic priest who made the RC's vows of celibacy seem like a crime against the human gene pool.

She wondered what it said about her spiritual fitness that her clearest messages from the Almighty seemed to come from the alternative rock station.

Oh. Sorry. I never met a woman priest before." "We're just like the men priests, except we're willing to pull over and ask directions.

Because the things you have, and the neighborhood you live in, doesn't have anything to do with what kind of human being you are.

So I can be the girl from Titanic who stays high and dry while you, the guy, vanish beneath the icy waves? I don't think so.

And as for people shunning us because of our known association with homosexuals"—here she wiggled her eyebrows, because she sounded ridiculously like Joseph McCarthy—"I say we don't want new members who would think like that. We want people who will admire us for taking a stand and who will say, 'Yes, that's Christianity; that's how I want to live it and that's the church I want to belong to.

She was pretty, yeah, but pretty like hundreds of other girls. You," he dabbed the bread in the air as if sketching her, "you're...memorable. Who you are just shines through your face.

If you know a person's history, you can use it to help predict what that person might do. A person's history can be the key to understanding his motivation for committing a crime.

So you worked for the war industry but came to your senses!" [Margy Van Alstyne] darted a glance at her son. "What rank were you?" "I was a captain when I resigned." [Clare] "Ha!" Margy Van Alstyne's elbow caught Russ in the solar plexus. "She outranks you, son! Finally, a woman who can boss you around!" "Every woman in my life bosses me around," he muttered, rubbing his stomach.

The old Confession was written by men who knew what it felt like to have done bad things: "We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable." Indeed.

I believe that prayer focuses our human thoughts and energies, sends them to the people we're praying for. I believe that helps, in ways we can't yet understand. I believe that God hears our prayers, and cherishes them. I believe He answers by sending us His spirit, giving us strength, and peace, and insight. I don't think he responds by turning away bullets and curing cancer. Though sometimes that happens.

Dear God, she thought, help me to accept as Christ accepted. Keep my mind on helping, not judging. And remind me to put in a five-mile run this evening.

There's something in me that recognized you. Right from the start. The parts of me that always felt alone, the parts of me that I always kept hidden away, out of sight—I could see that you had them, too.

There are moments in life that are between: between the blow and the pain, between the phone ringing and the answer, between the misstep and the fall. One that comes to everyone is a moment, or three, or five, between sleeping and waking, when the past has not yet been re-created out of memory and the present has made no impression. It is a moment of great mercy; disorienting, like all brushes with grace, but a gift nonetheless.

At the rectory, she debated acknowledging she was back on the job by wearing clericals, versus pissing the new deacon off by meeting her in her civvies. She compromised by wearing a black blouse, dog collar, and subdued black cardigan over a pair of old undress-green fatigues. "Interesting look," Lois said when Clare checked in for a report on the past week. "It's a clerical mullet," Clare said. "Business on the top, party on the bottom.

You know, sometimes, the first thing that comes to mind is the right thing, no matter how bizarre or improbable it seems," Clare said. "It could be your intuition was trying to tell you something.

Karen sighed. "I know. I could never fall for the easy guys either." She looked at Clare. "It's always the difficult ones that get under your skin, isn't it?

he were a young man, he might believe he would never forget her skin, or her smile, or the strength of her. But he had learned that the mind didn't always hold on to what the heart demanded. Remember, he told his hands. Remember this.

Through the snowy silver maple trees, he could see the gray stone stronghold of St. Alban's. She was in there, behind one of the diamond-paned windows, a block away and as far out of reach as the moon. On his CD player, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks was crooning, Without you, I'm not okay, and without you, I've lost my way… If he lived through this mess, he was never listening to country music again.