Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?
I’ve lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something – Being – having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether – if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There’s a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence.
The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed. In a calm, affectionate way they studied each other. Ames.
Time that had not come yet – an anomaly in itself – had the fiercest reality for her. It was a hard wind in her face; if she had made the world, every tree would be bent, every stone weathered, every bough stripped by that steady and contrary wind. Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change.
It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.
The world don’t want you as long as there is any life in you at all.
Some dogs bite. So you keep them away from people. You can’t just get rid of them, for being the way they are. And now and then you can be glad to have them around, to snarl the way a good dog never does.
I could probably not say more than that life is a very deep mystery, and that finally the grace of God is all that can resolve it. And the grace of God is also a very deep mystery.
She was afraid to be angry and that made her angry.
Your mother asked him if he would like to say grace, and he did, with an elegant simplicity that seemed almost wasted on macaroni and cheese.
If the Lord is more gracious than any of us can begin to imagine, and I’m sure He is, then your Doll and a whole lot of people are safe, and warm, and very happy. And probably a little bit surprised.
Kindly intentioned, but not considerate.
That reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind that we are able to do for each other in the ordinary cause of things.
Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life’s problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You’d have thought I’d died. We saved it for lunch.
History could make a stone weep.
Well, he says, basically, that people have to suffer to really recognize grace when it comes. I.
Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for us as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.
That strong, grassy smell, raw milk in a tin cup.
Everything always bears looking into, astonishing as that fact is.
Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it.