Over the past five years, I’ve said my best prayers every night, haven’t missed a night, though I gotta admit, if it wouldn’t break my mother’s heart, I’d probably have stopped a year ago. I mean, praying to be free of Hiskott only makes me expect to be free soon, and then when the prayer’s never answered, you feel even worse, and you wonder what’s the point. I’m not criticizing God, if that’s what you think, because nobody knows why God does things or how He thinks, and He’s humongously smarter than any of us, even smarter than Ed. They say He works in mysterious ways, which is for sure true. What I’m saying is, maybe the whole praying business is a human idea, maybe God never asked us to do it. Yeah, all right, He wants us to like Him, and He wants us to respect Him, so we’ll live right and do good. But God is good—right?—and to be really good you’ve got to have humility, we all know that, so then if God is the best of the best, then He’s also the humblest of the humble. Right? So maybe it embarrasses Him to be praised like around the clock, to be called great and mighty all the time. And maybe it makes Him a little bit nuts the way we’re always asking Him to solve our problems instead of even trying to solve them ourselves, which He made us so we could do. Anyway, so after almost giving up on prayer, and being pretty darned sure that God is too humble to sit around all day listening to us praise Him and beg Him, the funny thing is, I’m praying like crazy for Oddie. I guess I’m hopeless.

“All I could say was, 'Go get our album. And God bless you,'”

“I heard the voice of God saying, 'You have read your last book,'”

“It's definitely a great cause, ... It always impressed me the faith that he had in God.”

“I am an Iraqi citizen. Of course, I voted `yes,' ... God willing, there will be no terrorism.”

“God has more important things to worry about than who I sleep with.”

“The only thing I knew about Cincinnati was WKRP, and that's the honest-to-God truth.”

“God has primed me for this purpose. He has inspired me to be a voice for the voiceless.”

“There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is the finger of God on a man's shoulder.”

“My God, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!”