We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

what I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give.

I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.

When we celebrate Christmas, we are celebrating that amazing time when the Word that shouted all the galaxies into being limited all power and, for love of us, came to us in the powerless body of a human baby.

To refuse to respond is in itself a response.

life is the greatest gift that could ever be conceived ... A daffodil pushing up through the dark earth to the spring, knowing somehow deep in its roots that spring and light and sunshine will come, has more courage and more knowledge of the value of life than any human being I've met.

It's a very American trait, this wanting people to think well of us. It's a young want, and I am ashamed of it in myself. I am not always a good daughter, even though my lacks are in areas different from her complaints. Haven't I learned yet that the desire to be perfect is always disastrous and, at the least, loses me in the mire of false guilt?