“Remember: God's grief at the unspeakable things we do to one another is beyond measuring, but so is His mercy. It might seem a terrible thing to say to people who've lost and suffered so much at th...”

“History was a way to live extra lives, to cheat the limits of flesh and blood, to roll the rock back from the tomb and free the resurrected dead.”

“History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ...if you approached the past generously, so to speakits people as humans, not ...”

“You see, dearI think there are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world up into two kinds of people... and those who don't.”

“Feelings trap us in the self, Tony dear. Doing a thing because you feel wonderful about iteven a work of charityis in the end a selfish act. We perform the work not to feel wonderful but to know an...”

“Like the rest of Holy Week, Easter is also a terrific story. It starts as tragedy: the hero broken and bloody, against all expectation dead, his followers' joyful hope in him entombed with his corp...”

“The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to...”

“The Offices rerooted me in a tradition where, monk or not, I would always be at home. From long ago I knew the power of their repetition, the incantatory force of the Psalms. But they had an added ...”

“It sounds to me, dear, as if your satirist is a bit like a monk. They both take a rather dim view of the world, and both try to do something abou”

“One of my confreres sketched an explanation that attracted me: since the process of digestion is under the control of the brain, its cessation gave repose to the brain, allowed it a vacation.”

“God has made the Universe and all that is in it, can He ever fail to give us anything that we ask of Him today?”

“It seems to her [Saint Catherine of Siena] that the devil has this world in his power, not by his own will, for he is powerless, but through our help because we obey him. The evil aroma rising from...”

“Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.”

“Since God lives in the heart, I was not to seek some Being way up in the sky . . . my journey to God was not outward, but inward! The only way to get closer to God was to become ordered enough insi...”

“What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.”