If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.

You hear as many things as you would imagine. I hear voices of people I loved once. I hear moments that took place. I hear silences.

Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.

Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world's greatest need.

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

If what makes you happy is going out and living it up and spending all your money on wine, women, and song, the world doesn't need that. But on the other hand, if you give your life to good works - you go and work in a leper colony and it doesn't make you happy - the chances are you're not doing it very well.

He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking.