What we feel compelled to do, whether it’s making art or giving your life to God, evolves out of the inner fabric of our lives, however disguised the patterns may be to us. The work, the vocation, is an attempt on the part of the would-be artist to fulfill in an inner way, in a symbolic way, what the outer world is failing to provide him with in the service of wholeness.

What is memory but another narrative form?

Let thy good spirit enter my heart and there be heard without utterance, and without the sound of words speak all truth.

There is a place in me I haven’t gone yet.

We could all do with some silence, just sitting back
in a dark theater and watching humans living and working and
discovering their affinities without any words.

People commit thousands of small suicides every day that go unnoticed

If you are an artist, you learn how to trap the yearning and put it where you want it, put it where it goes. That’s the secret all true artists come to know.

Discontent,” Father Maturin said, enunciating the word with a strange vigor and looking straight at Elizabeth, “may be God’s catapult, His way of saying: ‘Go and try yourself now.

There were only a few stories worth telling, which is why they needed to be told over and over again, until everyone recognized them as his own experience.

When people are sensitive, they can tell when they meet someone who is going to influence their lives.

One of the notebooks was for musings and pep talks. … The other notebooks were for writing out the novel the way authors had done for centuries.

There was a great deal of energy and contentment to be gotten simply from not living a lie.

Squashed behind The Cloud of Unknowing we discovered a pocket-size spiral notebook with a day-by-day account of the time Justin had stayed with her and her husband after Tommy’s death. The writing was legible though it required effort (this was before she took her calligraphy course), but Justin was ecstatic and asked if he could have the little notebook. “This is my history,” he said. Later, after he had deciphered every last word: “Boy, was I loved.

During all my worrying about how and when and whether we’d ever get together again, I had neglected to imagine we might slip back together as naturally as a dislocated joint slipping back into place, followed by an ardor more straightforward than either of us had been capable of before.

When someone has enough money, logistics can be worked out in no time.

She was the kind of woman who, once she had made up her mind to like somebody, even if it had been an impulsive decision, would invest that person with all sorts of interesting and romantic aspects rather than admit she had been wrong.

Other people don’t exist when you’re not with them.

All beautiful, dangerous idols fall, I thought, if you keep your eye on them long enough

Maybe it’s because I’m more confident of my own powers now, not so afraid of losing myself, of being molded by other people’s needs of me, of being overwhelmed by them, that I can live in those strange, green days again and willingly be that girl.

If someone had really done you an ill turn and later came to you and said, “I am truly sorry,” would that mean as much to you as “the burden of it has been intolerable to me”?

Once you get yourself out of the way, you can see everything the way it is. Your self isn’t blocking the world from you, once you have sidestepped its shadow.

She was her steady self again, the one about whom Nonie had said, “I admire that woman. Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control her days.

General Confession it had been watered down to we are truly sorry and we humbly repent.

The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.

We can’t be free until we can tell our story, and only by telling it convincingly can we each do our bit to help the world grow up.

How glibly and thoughtlessly that phrase ‘make us grow’ slides off our tongues. As if growth were always a happy, shapely matter: leaves unfurling, blossoms opening, hearts and minds joyously stretching toward more light. Whereas the fact of the matter was, when we asked for growth, we were asking for a mess. Exploding tempers, privately nursed little petri dishes of resentments, insecure stumblings into dangerous new places.

The walk north was exactly the right distance to make me walk out of myself….If you walked out of yourself going north, what did you do on the return walk? Enjoyed my emptiness. Or sometimes just congratulated myself for escaping.

When I was in seminary,” Father Edward had told other guests around the table when he was purchasing his books, “my spiritual director told me not to read theology. ‘Read novels,’ he said, and I have.

Yes, if you believed in words, if you lived by words, you had better be careful which words you say and how you say them. You had better be careful what you look up, which words, which names. Jane Clifford, in The Odd Woman.

Nonie often remarked that every one of us needed to get away from other people and replenish our personal reserves.

In friendships . . . the requisits are always the same. Each provides the other with a refuge in time of trouble, with a continuum to fall back on in time of self-doubt, with an underpinning of earned trust upon which it is possible to build new achievements.

Remorse went out of fashion around the same time that “Stop feeling guilty,” and “You’re too hard on yourself,” and “You need to love yourself more” came into fashion.

These days won’t last forever. No days ever do, though sometimes it’s hard to convince oneself of that.

Not everybody gets to grow up. First you have to survive your childhood, and then begins the hard work of growing into it.

It was more like I saw him coming and knew he was the one. I went out of myself to meet him and then couldn’t get back inside without bringing him with me.”

But the son whips out a Bayer aspirin, the father rises to his feet, embraces the son, and Technicolor is restored to their lives.

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn’t know I knew.

As long as you can go on creating new roles for yourself, you are not vanquished.

This week I’ve learned that when you really love someone, you come to accept everything about them, all the moments in their history that have made them into just what they are. And I can accept everything in your past, because it has made you you.

Then he laughed, his typical laugh. Making me wish i had ten more such anectodes stashed away to keep him standing there, holding onto me and laughing.

A person always has control over how she meets her adversities, and the good news is that the facing of them, one after another, year after year, builds an inner strength that nobody can take away from you.

The human mind, as we know from personal experience, is a chronic time traveler, but we are repeatedly amazed by its ability to hitch up the body, the body that resides the only place it can— in present time— and pull it along like a wagon, with its entire load of sensory equipment, backward or forward into other time zones.

The future arches above us all like a giant question mark, looming or embracing by whims and turns.

May their having each other make more of them both.

There are things we can’t undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.

After all the human noise and conflicts have stopped, the absent person has more room in your heart to spread out and be herself. My mother’s been gone ten years and I know her much better now than when we saw each other every day.

I’m not sure I know what ‘simple-hearted’ means,” I said haughtily. “When there’s no deceit or malice in your heart. Most of us have some; it protects us. People without it are rare.

Because you’re a child and you have no way to compare your life to other people’s lives. Your foremost need is to stay safe within the only life you know.

There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more suprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing… They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard against congealing.

You’re supposed to get tired planting bulbs. But it’s an agreeable tiredness.

Heroics are not easily had for the young in our times. Perhaps that is why they go to such extremes to create their own dangers.

At times … one is downright thankful for the self-absorption of other people.

Life is a disease.

The race of children possesses magically sagacious powers.

I read constantly. If I don’t have a good book, I’m beside myself.

Who wanted to creep along in comfort when there was one chance in a thousand of flying?

What did a few ripples in the flesh matter when, all too soon, now or later, that flesh would be making its return journey to dust?

I’m always aware that I risk being taken for a neurasthenic prima donna when I explain to someone who wants ‘just a little’ of my time that five minutes of the wrong kind of distraction can ruin a working day.

Learning when ‘enough is enough’ is the discipline of a lifetime.

Hope does not necessarily have to take an object.

I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher’s desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.

I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them.

I believe that with enough practice and good faith, you can learn to recognize when the work is achieved.

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn’t know I knew.

I confess, right at the start, to the doubts – and sometimes outright dreads – that go with me as I climb the stairs to my study in the morning, coffee mug in hand: I have to admit to the habitual apprehension mixed with a sort of reverence, as I light the incense . . . and wonder: what is going to happen today? Will anything happen? Will the angel come today?

Something’s your vocation if it keeps making more of you.

Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit.

If there is such a thing as sin in this world, I think it must be shutting oneself up against hope.

How easy it was to make people happy, when you didn’t want or need anything from them.

The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.

Dreams say what they mean, but they don’t say it in daytime language.

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.

The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can’t congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning.

Negative people present us with an accelereted personal growth opportunity.

The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t know yet.

Some things arrive in their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.

There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more surprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing… They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard against congealing.

One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre