Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

How I wish you could have known me in my strength.

Avoid transgression. How’s that for advice.

It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water.

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty...

Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, all that fear and all that grief were about nothing....

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

My grandfather once told her if you couldn’t read with cold feet, there wouldn’t be a literate soul in the state of Maine.

There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

If you thought dead was just dead, then you wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.

There’s so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.

What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget...

There is so little to remember of anyone – an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the...

Earthly nature may be parsimonious, but the human mind is prodigal, itself an anomaly that in its wealth of error as well as of insight is exceptional, utterly unique as far as we know, properly...

We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement – our educational system – in the name of making the country more like itself.

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the...

I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind...

Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.I don’t know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them...

The broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the...

When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth.

It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.

She kept saying, “My husband will be back soon. He went for help. He’ll be back.” But that’s the kind of lie people tell sometimes when they got only strangers to rely on. There’s shame...

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.

Eliminate the overwhelming cost of phantom wars and fools’ errands, and humankind might begin to balance its books. After all, its only debts are to itself.

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.

Every writer I know, when asked how to become a writer, responds with one word:Read.

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the...

Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.

I felt, as I have often felt, that my failing the truth could have no bearing at all on the Truth itself, which could never conceivably be in any sense dependent on me or on...

Christianity is a life, not a doctrine . . . I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you...

It is…difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.[E]very memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance,...

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and...

It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of...

Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of...

It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the...

Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any...

remembering and forgiving can be contrary things

That’s the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you...

To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any...

Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.

If these laws [in the Bible] belonged to any other ancient culture we would approach them very differently. We need not bother to reject the code of Hammurabi. Presumably it is because Moses is still...

It seems to me some people just go around lookin’ to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.

You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what...

I could have married again while I was still young. A congregation likes to have a married minister, and I was introduced to every niece and sister-in-law in a hundred miles. In retrospect, I’m very...

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave – that is, to...

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.

My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on...

Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting… By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with...