In this spirituality of reading, I want to commend those who have nourished, challenged, stretched our imaginations in so many ways, who have helped us to believe, and hope, and love. I want to express my belief in another "communion of saints" . . . another community of people transcending the bounds of time and space, who, as canonized and uncanonized saints are for Roman Catholics, are our patrons, our friends, our companions on the journey. . . . They have finely observed and given testimony to the mysteries of life and personality, to motive, intention, and action, to passion and suffering and death, to love and hatred, to hope and fear, to evil, to bliss, the beauty of nature and our powerlessness under its ravages, to our struggle with human movements and institutions, to our search for meaning and the good, and some of them, explicitly, to our search for God.

Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth