When you are unhappy, is there anything more maddening than to be told that you should be contented with your lot?

True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.

The demon of acedia -- also called the noonday demon -- is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. . . . He makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and . . . he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself.

I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.

Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.

Spring seems far off, impossible, but it is coming. Already there is dusk instead of darkness at five in the afternoon; already hope is stirring at the edges of the day.

Men are more conventional than women and much slower to change their ideas.