“There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.”

Love makes labour light. Love alone gives value to all things.

Our body has this defect that, the more it is provided care and comforts, the more needs and desires it finds.

Love turns work into rest.

It is a great folly to be willing to violate the friendship of God, rather than the law of human friendship.

It is not a matter of thinking a great deal but of loving a great deal, so do whatever arouses you most to love.

Don’t imagine that, if you had a great deal of time, you would spend more of it in prayer. Get rid of that idea; it is no hindrance to prayer to spend your time well.

Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul.

It is of great importance, when we begin to practise prayer, not to let ourselves be frightened by our own thoughts.

This body of ours has one fault: the more you indulge it, the more things it discovers to be essential to it. It is extraordinary how it likes being indulged.

But the fact is, things always seem to come slowly when you are longing for them.

If this is the way You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few!

After you die, you wear what you are.

We shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God; for, beholding His greatness we realize our own littleness; His purity shows us our foulness; and by meditating upon His humility we find how very far we are from being humble.

All the troubles of the Church, all the evils in the world, flow from this source: that men do not by clear and sound knowledge and serious consideration penetrate into the truths of Sacred Scripture.

One always goes on as one begins.

If we practice love of neighbor with great perfection, we will have done everything.

Nora: i have questions. Patch: i should have known you’ve only been keeping me around for answers. Nora: well, that and your kisses. Anyone ever tell you you’re an incredible kisser?

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

I can’t answer either question. But the look she gives me reminds me of the look in the attack dog’s eyes in the aptitude test – a vicious, predatory stare. She wants to rip me to pieces. I can’t lie down in submission now. I have become an attack dog too.

Don’t make me regret this” i said, breathless. ” you haven’t regretted me once”. He kissed me, and i answered so hungrily i thought my lips would bruise. Patch&nora ( p. 180)

Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.

What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer.

My work stops at publication. If the books don’t contain in themselves their reasons for being – questions and answers – it means I was wrong to have them published.