the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all

I don't know that it makes any difference whether it's at this time or a hundred years before or a hundred years later. I think always it's a matter of simply listen[ing] to what is going on around you and in your own experience. Try to understand what's happening, or if not to understand it, at least to appreciate the reality of it.

I'm a hopeless prayer. I think somewhere in there I spend a great deal of time at it.

To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.

You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary

I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.

The Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world was never the same again, how their whole lives were changed with new significance.