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If I had had this experience earlier in life, I would have been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn't understand what it was that made ...more

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This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what i...more

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And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they couldn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dr...more

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...when we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselve...more

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

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But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.

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She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.

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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 incalculab...more

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Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.

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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 wa...more

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I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

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When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is t...more

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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 ...more

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Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

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It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance - for a moment or a year or the...more