“This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it.”

My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.

For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.

If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.

An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

Whether we or our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.

If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.

It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.

We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn’t make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn’t live without them.

Maybe subconsciously I feel I was meant to work hard for a living.

I feel like whatever is meant is meant. I feel like this is already written.

That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

In the end such a breach of trust and confidence meant that I had no option but to leave.

They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England.

My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.

What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

I didn’t realize he meant our nation.