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Robert Louis Stevenson said that to forget oneself is to be happy,
To be Left Out of the Narrative is catastrophe altogether.
defeated people who are without confidence in their own nature, they will
cling to the manner and morality of their conquerors.
Isn’t Odd nearly God, as Margaret Crowe says.
You can see the angle of the nose, the furrow between the dark eyes, and you know the old man is arriving in his skin. There’s going to be no way to escape him. But Grandfather is going to try. Yes sir. He’s going to apply the What-would-my-father-do to everything, and then choose the opposite.
Le Miroir du Monde of Gauntier of Metz, composed 1247, who located Paradise precisely ‘at the point where Asia begins’.
that human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.
You can’t imagine the world without you because once you do everything else takes on this kind of temporary sheen like breath blown on a window.
Father Tipp says the two signs of saints are guilt for no reason and being caught in a constant tide of undeserving.
It’s because people are so perishable. That’s the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment
didn’t want to be a writer, I wanted to be a reader, which is more rare. But one thing led to another.
And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated
And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure.
And in the same instant, by the curious calculus of the heart, he missed his own father. It was not Abraham himself but a better, kinder interpretation, an Abraham that had not existed except as possibility, but who now took over the
thought every adult must have these huge tides of emotion rising. Every adult must feel this wave of undeserving when they
They recognise each other in each other, and even in silence the familiarity is powerfully consoling, because despite time and difference there remains that deep-river current, that kind of maybe communion that only exists within people joined in the word family. So now what washes up between them, foam-white and fortifying and quite unexpectedly, is love.
Because I never made friends, because if you think about it making friends sounds fairly contrived and deliberate and sort of selfish, making your friends, and until the world taught me otherwise I’ll admit I always believed friends would somehow find me, would detect Ruth Swain-ness in the stratosphere and head out on their camels, I am used to being on my own. But now that I am imminently departing
The clock of one day is not the same as another. We invented time to make it seem so, but we know it’s not.
Then I was running and time was moving, lurching, too fast, so that soon it would be wrecked and pieces would break up and never come right so that here
The more you hope the more you hurt. The best of us hope the most. That’s God’s sense of humour.