Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents' house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see? No. But yeah. The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.

I might not be able to use the word "hope," but I could certainly use the word "optimism." I'm very optimistic. I don't feel that it helps to be pessimistic. At some point in my life I made a conscious decision that I would try to be optimistic - not blind to anything at all - but to always hear the way that had the best chance for happiness.