Before all else, the Gospel invites us to respond to the God of love who saves us, to see God in others and to go forth from ourselves to seek the good of others.
The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.
In vain we roared;in vain we tried To rouse her into laughter: Her pensive glances wandered wide From orchestra to rafter - "TIER UPON TIER!" she said,and sighed; And silence followed after.
Scarce was the verdict spoken, When that still calm was broken, A childish form hath burst into the throng; With tears and looks of sadness, That bring no news of gladness, But tell too surely something hath gone wrong!
The living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God. We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other.
It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren't good enough to follow her.
I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself.
Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the torturer.
Stories do not change the world. I’ve learned that. But perhaps in some secret, subtle way.... I mean it’s not the world I want to change.
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.
He builds whole world of imagery and passion, any one of which would have served another writer for a whole book, only to pull each of them to pieces and pour scorn on it.
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.
