God uses language to create and command us.

Parables release the adrenaline of urgency into our bloodstream.

I had escaped the snare of certitude that I welcomed so avidly at first and entered, via the name of Jesus, the wide and comprehensive company of Jesus.

We learn the language of prayer by immersing ourselves in the language that God uses to reveal Himself to us.

Apart from childhood and crisis, prayers have a way of being abstracted from the homely and distinctive details that are part and parcel of our ordinary and daily life.

Language consists in equal parts of speaking and silence.

Self-justification is a verbal defense for restoring the appearance of righteousness without doing anything about the substance.

The temptations that use the raw material of good for evil can continue unrecognized for a long time without awareness.

When it comes to doing something about what is wrong in the world, Jesus is best known for his fondness for the minute, the invisible, the quiet, the slow – yeast, salt, seeds, light. And manure.

Money and machines anesthetize neediness. They put us in charge, in control. As long as the money holds out and the machines are in good repair, we don't need to pray.

The end is where we start from. T.S. Eliot

And then there's the sickness I feel from looking at legs I can't touch, or at lips that don't smile at me. Or hips that don't reach for me. And hearts that don't beat for me.

One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring."

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

My house is me and I am it. My house is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams.

In the end men love better that for which they have made sacrifices than that through which they have enjoyed pleasures.

For that which all men then did virtue call, Is now called vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight virtue, and so used of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right

You may boo, you may turn your back, but I have devoted my life to the conservative cause.

Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck'd.

I would like it to be said: here lies a man who has done his duty on earth

If you want to succeed you must never stop learning, never stop trying and just keep being yourself. You are your own person. You make the choices in life that affect you.