Meanwhile, we are in time and the flesh is to be honored. At all ages. . . . For me, this summer, this had been clear in a threefold way. I have fed, bathed, played pat-a-cake with my grandbabies. In the night when I wake up, as I usually do, I always reach out to touch my husband’s body. . . . And my mother is almost ninety and preparing to move into a different country. I do not understand the mysteries of the flesh but I know that we must not be afraid to reach out to each other, to hold hands, to touch. . . .
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens.
It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God’s mercy shines, from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness. If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, if we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, an essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God.
Sad soul, take comfort, nor forget that sunrise never failed us yet.
There’s a time when you have to explain to your children why they’re born, and it’s a marvelous thing if you know the reason by then.
A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling “darkness” on the walls of his cell.
The purpose is to identify not with the body which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from my myths. Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is the vehicle? If you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this thing go like an old car. There goes the fender, etc. But it’s expected; and then gradually the whole thing drops off and consciousness rejoins consciousness. I live with these myths — and they tell me to do this, to identify with the Christ or the Shiva in me. And that doesn’t die, it resurrects. It is an essential experience of any mystical realization that you die to your flesh and are born to your spirit. You identify with the consciousness in life — and that is the god.
The tongues of violins! I think, O tongues, ye tell this heart, which cannot tell itself; this brooding, yearning heart, that cannot tell itself.
He had been building up one of those piles of thought, as ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from words let fall by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his own mind, about duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind the idea that he would ask Mary to marry him.
Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives.
The time on either side of now stands fast.
Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
