The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

Among my stillness was a pounding heart.

Every mistake committed is a learning opportunity.

You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle.

If it be good to come under the love of God once, surely it is good to keep ourselves there. And yet how reluctant we are!

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.

I believe it is impossible to make sense of life in this world except through art.

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

The hippogriff took off into the air. . . . He and his rider became smaller and smaller as Harry gazed after them . . . then a cloud drifted across the moon. . . . They were gone.

O God! I ask You for the means to do good, to avoid evil and to love the poor.

At heart, this job is about continuing to make great theatre for the people of Sheffield - a city I've known and loved since childhood.