Two people who think they’re in love can find out, when left alone, exactly how little they know about each other.”

The adventure of our first days together gradually blossomed into something else: a feeling I’d never had, which I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along.

Adulthood it a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.

The Greek Orthodox bishops made a point of snubbing John Paul. He didn’t complain. They insulted him. He didn’t defend himself. They demanded he apologize for Catholic sins from centuries ago. And John Paul, speaking on behalf of one billion living souls and the untold Catholic dead, apologized.

A priest can forgive a stranger so quickly that a boy can’t imagine how hard he will find it, someday, to forgive his own enemies. Or his own loved ones. He has no inkling that good men can sometimes find it impossible to forgive themselves. The darkest mistakes can be forgiven, but they can never be undone. I hope my son will always remain a stranger to those sins

A Greek has twenty-five centuries of painful history to keep his dreams in check, but there’s nothing more dangerous than to give an American hope. The

just need some time to think,” I say. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” I hesitate. “I’m sorry about tonight.” Before she can answer, I hang up. The ache that has been building for hours is now painful. When Simon and I used to feel this way after Mamma died, we would run cross-country and back. The hills. The steps. The shadows of the walls. We would run until we were buckled over, heaving on the ground, cooling ourselves in the overspray of the fountains. I close my eyes. Give him back to me, Lord. I need my brother. I

He told me once that praying is like being a soccer coach and calling saints off the bench.

O jeito de um garoto argumentar é encontrar uma posição defensiva e mantê-la, mesmo quando ela não é sincera.

Há uma velha regra que minhas irmãs me ensinaram. Sempre que você se encontrar com uma garota, faça-o em algum lugar bem conhecido. Os restaurantes franceses não impressionam se você não conseguir ler o menu, e filmes intelectuais são um tiro pela culatra se você não compreende a trama.

É melhor amar alguma coisa que possa amá-lo também.

What puzzles me most is the disappearance of the Diatessaron and where it might be now.

Because every desire has its proper object. It means people spend their lives wanting things they shouldn’t. The world confuses into taking their love and aiming it where it doesn’t belong.

A son is the promise that time makes to a man, the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him.

After Father died, she told me that it felt strange to have hands anymore, what with no one to hold them

So this is how my friend died. Because I taught him how to read the gospels. And because he had the bravery to speak out about what they revealed.

A death wish is not the same as a willingness to die.

Slowly, though, I find that the woman coming to my aid is no longer the woman I married. Rather, she is the wife and mother who left behind husband and son, who lived for years in tortured solitude, and who stands before me now as a virtuoso of the self-recrimination I’m only beginning to learn. She is helping me because she loves me, because she knows this darkness and has its map. There is indeed no medicine. But there is a journey I no longer have to make alone.

a boy can’t imagine how hard he will find it, someday, to forgive his own enemies. Or his own loved ones. He has no inkling that good men can sometimes find it impossible to forgive themselves. The darkest mistakes can be forgiven, but they can never be undone.

What a strange thing, to build a castle in the air. We made a friendship out of nothing, because nothing was the heart of what we shared.

Life has taught this boy to string nets beneath his hopes.

bullies the light out of the room.

The motto here is that a new door opens every time you push another man out a window.

Time is what disperses us.

I would sell my last cow for a handful of magical beans

His intelligence was relentless and wild, a fire even he couldn’t control. It swallowed entire books at a sitting, finding flaws in arguments, gaps in evidence, errors in interpretation, in objects, far from his own.

The magic of Paul’s intelligence is that he has more patience than anyone I’ve ever met, and with it he simply wears problems down. To count a hundred million stars, he told me once, at the rate of one per second, sounds like a job that no one could possibly complete in a lifetime. In reality, it would only take three years. The key is focus, a willingness not to be distracted. And that is Paul’s gift: an intuition of just how much a person can do slowly.

My old friend has gained weight. His shirt is wrinkled and his hair is too long. We clamp hands on each other and trade kisses on the cheek, holding on longer than we should, because as the distance has grown, so has the enthusiasm of our greetings. Someday we will be the greatest of strangers.

there’s reason to believe neither account reflects the facts. But the authors of both gospels—whoever those authors really were—believed Jesus was the Savior, so He must’ve been born in Bethlehem, as the Old Testament predicts.

Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, apes become men. It’s simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death.

People lie. People disagree. People make mistakes. To find out the truth, you have to know how to search for it.

Deep in the marrow of our religion is the conviction that loss and sacrifice are noble. To surrender something is the highest proof of Christian duty.

A Greek has twenty-five centuries of painful history to keep is dreams in check, but there’s nothing more dangerous than to give an American hope.

Hope, Paul said to me once, which whispered from Pandora’s box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion…Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.

The darkest mistakes can be forgiven, but they can never be undone.

Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.

With that in mind, I try to imagine the greatest gift I could’ve given my father. And as sleep descends on me, the answer seems strangely clear: my faith in his idols. That was what he wanted all along – to feel that we were united by something permanent, to know that as long as he and I believed in the same thing, we would never be apart.

When God became human, He made Himself into an image. By His own incarnation, He shattered the prohibition against art.

The two hardest things to contemplate in life are failure and age, and those are one and the same.

The worst thief is a bad book.

So ended the formative period in [his] life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn’t the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.

They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don’t follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage.

Because every desire has its proper object…people spend their lives wanting things the shouldn’t. The world confuses them into taking heir love and aiming it where it doesn’t belong…All it takes to be happy is to love the right things, in the right amounts. Not money. Not books. People. Adults who don’t understand that never feel fulfilled.

Leanoardo wrote that a painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Most painters do the opposite, starting with a whitewash and adding the shadows last. But Paul, who knows Leonardo so well you’d thing the old man slept on the bottom bunk, understands the value of starting with the shadows. The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see.

Time passed, worlds diverged

Love lost is a special kind of failure, I think. It’s a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come; that some apes will never be men, not in all the world’s ages.

Never mix books and bed. In the spectrum of excitement, sex & thought were on opposite ends. Both to be enjoyed, but never at the same time.

A son is a promise that time makes to a man,the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him.

Inde fernut, titidem qui vivere debeat annos, corpre de patrio parvum phenica renasci’ It’s from Ovid. It means, ‘A little phoenix is born anew from the father’s body, fated to live the same number of years.

I’d begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.

Hope…which is whispered from Pandora’s box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion.

The only things people can ever know about you are the ones that you let them see

That was the recipe of our relationship, I think. We gave each other what we never expected to find.

we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing.

Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yard-stick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.

The adventure of our first days together gradually blossomed into something else: a feeling I’d never had, which I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along.

a good friend stands in harm’s way for you the second you ask–but a great friend does it without being asked at all.

The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.

Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness.