I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart.
When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily.
Grace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.
I recall hearing one of my professors in seminary say that one of the best tests of a person's theology was the effect it has on one's prayers.
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.
It is a subliminal thing. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.
After all, hadn't she been the one to pursue him? And Madame Dupuy had done it with a vigor that most women would have been too ashamed to display.
Making love is not something you do to someone―it's something you share. Lovemaking between men and women should be mutually pleasurably. Both women and men should be fully and completely satisfied.
The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else...
I don't believe in the term 'guilty pleasure,' because it implies I should feel ashamed for liking something. A real guilty pleasure would be, I don't know, taking gratification in some stranger's ghastly death or something - which I guess I do enjoy...
I'm always going to be making costumes. It's one of the ways I relax my brain. In addition to the pleasure of having the piece, there is a deep and abiding pleasure for me assembling something in my head - learning to know something in its totality i...
We understand and recognize what is good, but we do not labor to bring it to fulfillment, some of us out of laziness, some because we put something else, some pleasure, before virtue--and there are many pleasures in life, long conversations and indol...
We two make banquets of the plainest fare In every cup we find the thrill of pleasure... For us life always moves with lilting measure We two, we two, we make our world, our pleasure
Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that is hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than ...
There are neither raptures, nor ecstasies, nor transports of bliss in the pleasures of the table; but they make up in duration what they lose in intensity, and are distinguished above all by the merit of inclining us towards all the other pleasures o...
I always think of the live show first, where the song is gonna go in the show. That's why they aren't sad songs. When I play, I want to make people happy, not sad. It's such a pleasure for me to do what I do, and I want other people to feel some form...
You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate...
The quality common to the three experiences... is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasu...
