Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me.

It's very easy in a way, horrible in some ways, but simply to give up the whole thing, to say, "Well, the hell with it, as far as I'm concerned life is pointless and [so] live the fullest, most successfully self-fulfilling life you can and let the rest go hang" - I've never reached that point in my life.

Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.

Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse.

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

That's five friends, one each for Jesu's wounds, and Godric bears their mark still on what's left of him as in their time they all bore his on them. What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds?

The Jesus who is the one whom we search for even when we do not know that we are searching and hide from even when we do not know that we are hiding.