Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.
The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.
Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.
Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.
I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation.
One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.
Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.
It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.
Rejoice with those who rejoice." I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep.
Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.
The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.
I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.
Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.
Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.
I think a Christian definition of the mind should be: an openness to whatever the individual and collective mind reveals to us.
I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.
My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.
I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.
... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.
Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs and every song recalls a thousand sorrows and so they are infinite in number and all the same.
A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
He will wipe the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required
Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.
I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.
Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.
One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.
We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.
It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.
I have always liked the phrase "nursing a grudge " because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.
It saddens me that Christians need to be reminded that awe is owed also to those who disagree with them, who believe otherwise than they do.
There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.
When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.
--"There is no justice in love...it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality... the eternal breaking in on the the temporal.
Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.
I think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.
I don't claim to know what it means to say that we are made in the image of God, but I profoundly and instinctively believe it and all that it implies.
The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.
In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.
It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.
The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.
More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.
My family was pious and Presbyterian mainly because my grandfather was pious and Presbyterian, but that was more of an inherited intuition than an actual fact.
When I read 'Paradise Lost,' or 'Richard III,' it is clear that Milton and Shakespeare took real pleasure and satisfaction from creating these epitomes of evil.
Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are 1) where it comes from, and 2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute.
The only obligation I recognize is to say what I believe to be true [ ] and to say it with kindness. I believe that is how a Christian conversation should proceed.
I would advise you against defensiveness on priciple. it precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level it expresses a lack of faith.
I'm amazed at what I have taken for granted. How to truly take in our situation I don't know, but I wish I had started asking myself that question earlier than I did.
...if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.
Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.
Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.