Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.
I write what I would like to read.
Peace - that was the other name for home.
Changing husbands is only changing troubles.
Wariness about change is a kind of prairie wisdom.
There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.
There are men I could spend eternity with. But not this life.
Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
One may have been a fool, but there's no foolishness like being bitter.
Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.
Men are more conventional than women and much slower to change their ideas.
When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.
Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.
Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.
Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.
I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.
Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,--service is the secret.
This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.
Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine.
Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.
The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.
It's all so beautiful . . . the spring . . . and books and music and fires. . . . Why aren't they enough?
If we are lucky, we can give in and rest without feeling guilty. We can stop doing and concentrate on being.
Traversing a slow page, to come upon a lode of the pure shining metal is to exult inwardly for greedy hours.
The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.
We can't give our children the future, strive though we may to make it secure. But we can give them the present.
When you are unhappy, is there anything more maddening than to be told that you should be contented with your lot?
Pay close attention to objects, events and natural phenomenon that would otherwise get chewed up in the daily grind.
But in order to have an adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion.
The often heard lament, 'I have so little time,' gives the lie to the delusion that the daily is of little significance.
I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers.
You can only see one thing clearly, and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that, and cling to it through thick and thin.
I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.
I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.
To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.
I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.
In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made
Spring seems far off, impossible, but it is coming. Already there is dusk instead of darkness at five in the afternoon; already hope is stirring at the edges of the day.
But hope has an astonishing resilience and strength. Its very persistence in our hearts indicates that it is not a tonic for wishful thinkers but the ground on which realists stand.
If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.
The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. Though you may say the “I do” of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married.
The Christian religion asks us to put our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God Who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and Who desires to be present to us in our ordinary circumstances.
When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening. . . . I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.
Each and every one of us has one obligation, during the bewildered days of our pilgrimage here: the saving of his own soul, and secondarily and incidentally thereby affecting for good such other souls as come under our influence.
Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.
For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn't know we needed and take us places where we didn't know we didn't want to go. As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before.
Acedia is a danger to anyone whose work requires great concentration and discipline yet is considered by many to be of little practical value. The world doesn't care if I write another word, and if I am to care, I have to summon all my interior motivation and strength.
True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.
