191 quotes found
“Somewhere and I can't find where I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest 'If I did not know about God and sin would I go to hell?' 'No' said the priest 'not if you...”
“The dedicated life is the life worth living.”
“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.”
“In literary history generation follows generation in a rage.”
“There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary a batch of technical skills and equipment and perhaps a vision of some single slice of the beauty and...”
“Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you...”
“So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.”
“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
“Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you.”
“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.”
“Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around mak...”
“Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid pen...”
“Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point mos...”
“An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker...”
“Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It’s one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a beauty...”
“Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everythin...”
“That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks “the ...”
“Lou asked point-blank, Can love last? (Rural people get to philosophizing, and will say anything.)—Oh, darling! No, not that heart-thumping passion. Give that eighteen months. But it’s replaced by ...”
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.”
“If she[…] had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take - and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery...”
