27 quotes
American novelist and essayist
“It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.”
"There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm."
on Gratitude
"I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.I'll pray, and then I'll sleep."
on Faith
"You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time."
on Life
"Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it."
"Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery."
"There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."
"A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."
on Relationships
"But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it."
on Love
"We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself."
on Philosophy
"i know more than i know and must learn it from myself"
"I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come."
"The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art."
on Perception
"I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally."
"...morality is a check upon the strongest temptations."
"The best things that happen I'd never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather."
". . . there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving."
"There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient"
"I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things."
"Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was."
"There's so much to be grateful for, words are poor things."
