"He is a good priest, deeply kind and human, who at diocesan headquarters is even considered a bit of a freethinker, on the dangerous side. His outbursts fill his colleagues with glee, and he stresses them with a look meant to be fiery, but which gives me such a deep sensation of stale discouragement that it almost brings tears into my eyes." Chapter 1, pg. 1.

"What is the use of working out chances? There are no chances against God." Chapter 1, pg. 6.

"I would even go so far as to say that it is hard for us to be strictly honest in money matters. Better run no risk of meddling, were it ever so innocently, with what most laymen regard not as a means, but an end in itself." Chapter 1, pg. 6.

"When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own...