It's a modified version of a quote from the bridge of San Luis Rey: Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God. I think this quote gets at the fundamental question of what a god would actually be like: either totally indifferent or meticulously obsessive.