“Philosophy – hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.”

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt – less and less sharp and biting into you.

Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.

Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.

You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.

It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.

It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.

It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

Desire is no light thing.

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. … We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

The secret apparently is half a cup of dark rum.

When I spoke, I was listened to; and I was at a loss to know how I had so easily acquired the art of commanding attention, and giving the tone to the conversation.

We are indeed much more than what we eat

To my surprise I found her cheerful and free of pain, perhaps because of the small doses of morphine she was being given.

Sets you free from all bondage and all seeking.

I’m newly widowed, so I’ve gone from having a life partner, and having another brain to make decisions with

I made a concerted effort, last year and this year, to get a range of characters

Every church needs to be able to answer two questions. First, what is our plan for making disciples? And second, does our plan work?