It is one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also. You are very near then to being friendless in the world.

Love is a strange fact - it hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. It makes no sense at all.

Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.

Fair is whatever God wants to do.

I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers.

Pride is the rope God allows us all.

Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw. I've been there and am going back. Make of it what you will.

You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any.

Hope is like yeast, you know, rising under warmth.

When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.

So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.

Sirs, so much as your hearts as is empty of Christ and heaven, let it be filled with shame and sorrow, and not with ease (483).

For me beauty is valued more than anything - the beauty that is manifest in a curved line or in an act of creativity.

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.

The pencil-stroke is like cutting into the heart.

Set your sails now but the ocean is very rough and treacherous... if you keep going you will get there.

What is true of the individual will be true of the whole family; what is true of the family will be true of the community, and of the state.

The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned.

I sometimes think Adam and Eve were Russians. They didn't have a roof over their head, nothing to wear, but they had one apple between them and they thought that was Paradise.

Some preachers ought to put more fire into their sermons or more sermons into the fire.