Category: Writers

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving.

I don’t ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride, married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.

The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees – to learn something by being nothing.

The birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus means that one day everything sad will come untrue.

Living by faith includes the call to something greater than cowardly self-preservation.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

How do you move on? You move on when your heart finally understands that there is no turning back.

The chief purpose of life, for any of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, 0 Lord, Creator, Hallowed one, You still, hour by hour sustain it.

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.