But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.

This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.

I've since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

He said, if you allow yourself to be enchanted by the beauty to be seen in even ordinary things, then all things proved to be extraordinary.

It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.

I just became fascinated with how complex and unlikely the universe is and life is and Catholicism gives me an answer to that.