How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph.)
Quote #10
They lay quiet for a while in the hut. The priest thought the lieutenant was asleep until he spoke again. "You never talk straight. You say one thing to me—but to another man, or a woman, you say 'God is love.' But you think that stuff won't go down with me, so you say different things. Things you think I'll agree with."
"Oh," the priest said, "that's another thing altogether—God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of loved mixed with a pint pot of ditch water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us—God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graces and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around."
Notice the variation in the priest's voice. At first he's speaking objectively about God's love and what it is, but then he gets all personal, noting how someone like him would react to such love. So when he says that God's love might look like hate, is he speaking about the reality of God's love or his own perception of it?