Hold a book in your hand and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.
…when we say we’re looking for a spiritual adviser, we’re really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.
Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.
All grief, anyone’s grief…is the weight of a sleeping child.
History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?
It’s not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.
Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time