Openness to God demands our growing acceptance that we cannot create blueprints for our own lives. Though God’s character is unchanging, the ways of God are unpredictable, and there is a difference between arbitrariness and unpredictability.
The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.
God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.
When you meet the person you're supposed to be with for the rest of your life, they make you whole. They're your other half. Yes, life can be good, but once you meet your other half, it's fucking wonderful.
Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be gr...
How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?
We all spin stories. That's what we do. We want people to see certain things about us and not others. What matters is whether you let others in to the truest story, the one that's the hardest to tell.
It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.
We do not enjoy a story fully at first reading. Not till curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savor the real beauties.
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
If you can't be real and firm with others about who you are, you will be doomed to a phony, plastic bullshit existence, where you only live for others.
Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
I loved him with a passion of which I had no idea I was capable. I loved him partly to defend him against the world and partly because I genuinely believed we were soul mates.
I was taught growing up not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers, to withdraw myself from the sinful 'others'. But we are all others. We are all sinners in someone's eyes.
He knows what he'll find if he digs deeper. there's no rush to unpack my insides. he understands there is nothing special about emptiness, nothing interesting about depression.
I don't know how to describe it, but the more I stare at him, the more I see his grief wrapped around him like shackles he can never take off.
Half the night I waste in sighs, Half in dreams I sorrow after The delight of early skies; In a wakeful dose I sorrow For the hand, the lips, the eyes, For the meeting of the morrow, The delight of happy laughter, The delight of low replies.
Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women are the most wretched. When, for an extravagant sum, we have bought a husband, we must then accept him as possessor of our body.
When they came it was as if the lord of the world had arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along; and when they went they left a calm behind which was like the deep sleep which follows an orgy.
Of what are you thinking now?" she asked. "I am thinking of myself." "That's just what I am doing." "Are you also thinking of yourself?" "No, of yourself—of you, Mogens.
