For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.

Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good.

Why don't you conceive of God as an ally who is coming, who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy?

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.

You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.

God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.