... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.

Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing.

Not to love is, psychically, spiritually, to die. To live for yourself alone, hoarding your life for your own sake, is in almost every sense that matters to reduce your life to a life hardly worth the living, and thus to lose it.

If you want to be holy, be kind.

God doesn't reveal his grand design. He reveals Himself.

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.

I don't know how to save my own life, so anything they've found in what I've written that saved theirs - I can't take responsibility for it.