A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its own love be swayed down to the world? ...how it might, because it could know its own creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death?

If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.