From an author whose brilliance and insight still astounds me
though his stand with the Lord is not my own.
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second- guessing in The New York Review of Books.
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is—its irresistible charm—a fire.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.(thanks be to God I am what I am)
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
God is one word we do not have to look up in the dictionary, because we are born with an understanding of him.
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