We have a light upon our house, and it gives hope to all who sail upon the stormy seas. Do ya know what it means to have a light burning atop your home? It is safety, a place of refuge, seen by all that as a signal that ye stand for something greater...
Tell me something wonderful," he said to Dane. "Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep." "You're always writing one of your plays on the phone," said Dane. "I said, something wonderful. Say something about springtime." "It...
If you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out... Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whin...
In youth, our blood rises and becomes volatile. Desire, worry, and anxiety increase. External circumstances now direct the rise and fall of emotions. Will and intention become constrained by social conventions. Competition, conflict, and scheming are...
Our culture has bred consumers and addicts. We eat too much, buy too much, and want too much. We set ourselves on the fruitless mission of filling the gaping hole within us with material things. Blindly, we consume more and more, believing we are hun...
I propose a toast to mirth; be merry! Let us complete our course of law by folly and eating! Indigestion and the digest. let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy the depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great diamond. I am happy. ...
He wanted desperately to stay, just a little while longer. But he couldn't be here, in this place, with her. It was calm here. She was innocent and beautiful and perfect. He was not. He didn't want his mess or his mental illness or his past anywhere ...
This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we--even our poets and musicians and inventors--never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials to build from. All we can know abou...
The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worl...
To know Christ entails accepting his will as norm. When we feel this we draw back, startled for it means the cross. The it is better to say honestly: “I can’t yet,” than to mouth pious phrases. Slow there with the large words “self-suffender,...
God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. ... It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one coul...
that you would not anticipate misery since the evils you dread as coming upon you may perhaps never reach you at least they are not yet come Thus some things torture us more than they ought, some before they ought and some which ought never to tortur...
Every once in a while I don't think it's a bad idea for lawyers to remember that what goes on, at least on some level of our brains, is that we have to imagine everything coming apart. ... It's what we are. Out of control, always prepared, Boy Scout ...
But I've never even been to Olympus! Zeus is crazy!" Chiron and Grover glanced nervously at the sky. The clouds didn't seem to be parting around us, as Grover had promised. They were rolling straight over our valley, sealing us in like a coffin lid. ...
... he couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our deve...
Whenever someone says some- thing about us, it gets written inside us, permanently. The good words, the ugly words, it’s all right here.” I placed a palm against my chest. “Sure, you can scribble out the words or try to paint over them, but ben...
Bean finds the best apple in our tree and hands it up to me. "You know what this tastes like when you first bite into it?" she asks. "No, what?" "Blue sky." "You're zoomed." "You ever eat blue sky?" "No," I admit. "Try it sometime," she says. "It's a...
Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the ...
I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "B...
Trying so hard to make things go our way in this world, doing so much leaning, is exhausting. I am convinced that is exactly what Jesus had in mind when he said, ‘Come to me all you who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest’ (Matthew...
Magistrate: What do you propose to do then, pray? Lysistrata: You ask me that! Why, we propose to administer the treasury ourselves Magistrate: You do? Lysistrata: What is there in that a surprise to you? Do we not administer the budget of household ...
