So if the Infernum is an empy interior, what's Heaven in their conception?" I asked, nudging him. "A second inside-out house, inside, or rather 'outside' the first," he said. "If you cross its threshold, you realize our world, for all its wonder, has...
The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing...
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry ...
You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.” My companion flushed up with pleasure at my words, and the earnest way in which I uttered them. I had already observed that he was as sensitive to flatte...
It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it. It can show you the world you know in a way that makes you realise you've never...
Every man or woman who loves [God], they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He's apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serv...
There is a magic to intimacy, a world built of sighs and skin that is thicker than brick, stronger than iron. There is only you, and him, so impossibly close that nothing can come between. Not the enemy, not your allies. In this safe haven, in this h...
He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. S...
After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps,...
Why do we live out every day as if there is no hope to overcome our chaos and no possibility for living a stressed-less life when Scripture repeatedly reassures us that God has the power and the peace to make that happen?
The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he t...
What we view as God’s absence or lack of quickness to change our circumstances or fix our problems is really God waiting for the proper time to act on our behalf, while simultaneously waiting for us to acknowledge our need for rescue.
I can only imagine how happy life would be if we could stay so grounded in our faith that we would never waver in our positive attitudes.
I had been so focused on why we were suffering through all these adversities that I had neglected to think about who could get me through them or how God was going to mold our hardships to be for his glory.
The Cynics emphasized that true happiness is not found in external advantages such as material luxury, political power, or good health. True happiness lies in not being dependent on such random and fleeting things. And because happiness does not cons...
In an unfathomable expanse of universe supporting galaxies of star systems with orbiting planets innumerable, I am nothing. And yet to the few bodies encircling my tiny little spot in the world, I am essential.
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that let...
The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She...
I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than an...
My choices, it seemed, were to be branded a sinner and live my life alone; to abandon my faith, the one thing I held most dear in the entire world; or to lie to everyone, pretend I was straight, and forget about it all.
The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called ...
