It does not matter that we cannot fathom this mystery. The only real problem comes when we think that we have.
Their love was a bright flower, youthful and radiantly beautiful.
I can’t think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as education experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group.
If you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t know how to be happy.
You don’t want him for a reason. You want him because he’s your father.
You’re going to get hurt yourself, and badly, if you take everything so hard.
There is in God, some say, a deep but dazzling darkness.
Like all great fantasists, he has taught me about life, life in eternity rather than chronology, life in that time in which we are real.
It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.
My dear, I’m seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren’t told that difficult or painful things won’t happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.
It takes too much energy to be against something unless it’s really important.
It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.
If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love.
It’s hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we’re left with a fistful of ashes.
Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.
The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.
Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general.
We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.
We cannot always cry at the right time and who is to say which time is right?
We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.