To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business-not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into... rhetoric and plot.

Everything was a miracle until we solved it. ... the first man who ever saw a flying fish probably thought he was witnessing a miracle - and the first man who ever described a flying fish was doubtless called a liar.

When Catherine told me about this (tragedy nearby), I could only say, shocked, "Dear God, that family needs grace." She replied firmly, "That family needs casseroles," and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this _is_ grace.

I think it's wonderful when a love story begins with a great deal of romance and affection, passion and excitement, that's how it should be. But I don't necessarily know that it's the wisest thing in the world to expect that it ends there, or that it should, 30 years down the road, still look as it did on the night of your first kiss.

Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one....This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.

At that moment of realization (that union with God is always present), that's when God let me go, let me slide through His fingers with this last compassionate, unspoken message: You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.

You have to get hurt. That's how you learn. The strongest people out there, the ones who laugh the hardest with a genuine smile, those are the people who have fought the toughest battles. Because they've decided that they're not going to let anything hold them down, they're showing the world who's boss. One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.