No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.
His greatest satisfaction as a priest was to grant absolution, to help people forgive themselves for not being perfect, make amends, and get on with life.
Dachshunds have their own agenda and can be stubborn about seeing their plans through to completion. What Rosie lacked in consistency, she made up for in enthusiasm. Most of the time when I called her...
But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren’t human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.
As far as Wyatt Earp knew, it was not illegal to beat a horse. In the past few years, he’d worked as a part-time policeman in a string of Kansas cow towns. Each time he was sworn in, he made an effort...
Abandon a dachshund and upon your return, you may well be confronted with a small token of her displeasure. This, for the dachshund, is an undignified but necessary form of training. Eventually, you w...
And yet, in the end, did Klara Hitler's sickly son ever fire a gun? One hollow, hateful little an. One last awful thought: all the harm he ever did was done for him by others.
Eternal beginner, starting over and over in a new place in new circumstances, with new languages, new people, a new commission. They had this in common: the continual rushed confrontation with change,...
You’ve seen what, Emilio conceded, but not why! That’s where God is, Anne. In the why of it—in the meaning.
To Robert, he wrote, In Texas, rocks are considered inadequate weaponry during school yard scuffles. Dallas children carry a brace of loaded pistols, a concealed Deringer, and a six-inch toadsticker i...
They were beaten [bullies]. Ninety-nine out of a hundred still are, inside. A man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Mostly, it works...That's why a bully...
There was a real sweetness to that man: a special sort of gentleness that you see sometimes in people who've been hurt bad but don't want revenge. [Bessie about James]
The answer was clear, though he half-expected his hand to shrivel and turn black when he voted for a Republican.
So God just leaves? John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. Abandons creation? You’re on your own, apes. Good luck! No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of huma...
Not just survival but a good life, full of learning, full of love, Emilio thought, and took a step closer to the death he felt inside himself. He
My life has a certain amusing symmetry, if viewed with sufficient detachment.
Maybe God is only the most powerful poetic idea we humans’re capable of thinkin’, he said one night, after a few drinks. Maybe God has no reality outside our minds and exists only in the paradox of Pe...
Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.
It no longer came as a surprise to John Candotti that people found him easy to confess to. He was tolerant of human failings and it was rarely difficult for him to say, Well, you screwed up. Everybody...
It didn’t occur to him to think that better is not the same as well. Was he fooling himself? He would not have said so. Even at twenty-two, when his diagnosis was confirmed, he was realistic. Most suf...