...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.

But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it's the world's brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

I see that I must give what I most need.