“People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.”

It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” – Mrs. Brown

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.

The happiest people are the ones with the most community.

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.

Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.

If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.

That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it’s the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband’s mood.

We need to practice acting in spite of fear, in spite of doubt, in spite of worry, in spite of uncertainty, in spite of inconvenience, in spite of discomfort, and even to practice acting when we’re not in the mood to act.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

Wherever we start to think that things are certain, uncertainty is lurking right there. Heedlessness is just holding things as certain. It is grasping at certainty where there is no certainty and looking for truth in things that are not true. Be careful! They are likely to bite you sometime in the future!

The door to God is the insecurity of not knowing anything. Bear the grace of that uncertainty and all wisdom will be yours.

Of its origin, of its history, of its object, nor any explanation of its mysteries and symbols, which does not leave the mind in total uncertainty on all these points.