Like faith, marriage is a mystery. The person you're committed to spending your life with is known and yet unknown, at the same time remarkably intimate and necessarily other. The classic seven-year itch may not be a case of familiarity breeding ennui and contempt, but the shock of having someone you thought you knew all too well suddenly seem a stranger. When that happens, you are compelled to either recommit to the relationship or get the hell out. There are many such times in a marriage.

Before you begin a thing, remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. If you could see them clearly, naturally you could do a great deal to get rid of them but you can't. You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.

The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.

I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?

Changing husbands is only changing troubles.

Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,--service is the secret.

They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.