“But all years are stupid. It’s only when they’re over that they become interesting.”

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.

You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else’s body.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

A corpse is what’s left after waking too often.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

When your life begins to harm you, know that you have taken a detour from your true path.

When I lost hope, hope came and found me, when I stopped believing in faith, faith believed in me.

This lost world will never be reached and brought back to loyalty to God, until the children of God wake up to the fact that they have a mission in the world. If we are true Christians we should all be missionaries.

The main thing, of course, always, is the fact that there is only one of you in the world, just one, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost. Ambition is not enough; necessity is everything.

Proclaiming the gospel to a lost world cannot be just another activity to add to the church’s crowded agenda. It must be central to who we are. It forms our identity.

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.

I quickly learned I needed someone who specifically enjoyed, or at the very least could take it, when I hit that point of blinding release. Every time, I lost all sense of the control I work so hard at maintaining.

He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.