There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.
She conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing i...
She kept saying, "My husband will be back soon. He went for help. He'll be back." But that's the kind of lie people tell sometimes when they got only strangers to rely on. There's shame in that, so pe...
I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.
Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human lif...
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.
Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the sec...
Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
If we do not know the character of being itself - I have never seen anyone suggest that we do know it - then there is an inevitable superficiality in any claim to an exhaustive description of anything...
She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.
But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.
She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that every...
Light is constant, we just turn over in it.
I think about things like the fact that nobody knows what time is. Time is what? Nobody can describe it, even physics or math or anything else. But it is what we continuously experience. It's the stat...
I'm a great admirer of secularism. At its best, I think it's one of the best things that we have. I don't believe in insinuating religion into conversation. I don't believe in excluding it from conver...
I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.
Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility o...
Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.
It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.