“If a man does not find those things for which his heart is made, if he is never even invited to live for them from his deep heart, he will look for them in some other way.”
“I love the part when he tells the angel what to say—that’s brilliant,” Mr. Fish said. “And how he throws his mother aside—how he starts right in with the criticism…I mean, you get the idea, right away, that this is no ordinary baby. You know, he’s the Lord! Jesus—from Day One. I mean, he’s born giving orders, telling I had no idea it was so…primitive a ritual, so violent, so barbaric. But it’s very moving,” Mr. Fish added hastily, lest Dan and I be offended to hear our religion described as “primitive” and “barbaric.”
“If you have developed enough spiritual sensitivity to understand that there is no abiding peace or happiness to be found in ordinary human existence, you are qualified to study the deeper mysteries of spiritual life.”
“Nevertheless, we all of us, to varying degrees, believed that when you saw the person you were copied from, you’d get some insight into who you were deep down, and maybe too, you’d see something of what your life held in store.”
“Gramps always ends this story by saying, “That bed has been around my whole life, and I’m going to die in that bed, and then that bed will know everything there is to know about me.”″
“Clues to your passion are always around you. The sequence of events that led me to that stage began when I least expected it, but I was on the lookout for something more, something meaningful in my ilife. And even then I had to battle my natural instincts to experience it. You’ll only find your passion if you search and fight to discover it.”
“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”
“Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom.”
“Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you. I thought about the gut-brain information axis. Maybe you’re already gone. The prisoners run the jail now. Not a person so much as a swarm. Not a bee, but the hive.”
“The problem with happy endings, I said, is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.”
“She gazed at him with touched and troubled eyes. ‘Is that all?...Isn’t there something over and above earthly things—some more glorious meaning to one’s life and activities?‘”
“I am going to look at the stars. They are so far away, and their light takes so long to reach us, all we ever see of stars are their old photographs.”
“In spite of feeling so very moved by the thing, I didn’t have any immediate theories about what it meant. Sometimes great art is like that. It affects you and you can’t say why. Was it deep symbolism? A cryptic message? A wrenching plea for help and understanding? Impossible to say, and to me, not the most important thing at first. I just wanted to breathe it in.”
“Is there some meaning to this life?
What purpose lies behind the strife?
Whence do we come, where are we bound?
These cold questions echo and resound
through each day, each lonely night.”
“In the schools of business administration Negroes are trained exclusively in the psychology and economics of Wall Street and are, therefore, made to despise the opportunities to run ice wagons, push banana carts, and sell peanuts among their own people. Foreigners, who have not studied economics but have studied Negroes, take up this business and grow rich.”
“Because the thing is, what the man on the bus had said to me made complete and utter sense. I know it sounds odd, and I know it might seem meaningless to you, but to me those three words had... done something.”
“I need you to understand something. I wrote this for you. I wrote this for you and only you. Everyone else who reads it, doesn’t get it. They may think they get it, but they don’t. This is the sign you’ve been looking for. You were meant to read these words.”
“Thus, nothing can be written about ministry without a deeper understanding of the ways in which ministers can make their own wounds available as a source of healing.”
“And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.”
“The alarm shakes the bedside table. Without opening her eyes, Elisa feels for the clock’s ice-cold stopper. She’d been in a deep, soft, warm dream and wanted it back, one more tantalizing minute. But the dream eludes wakeful pursuit; it always does. There was water, dark water-that much she remembers. Tons of it, pressing at her, only she didn’t drown. She breathed inside it better, in fact, than she does here, in waking life, in drafty rooms, in cheap food, in sputtering electricity.”
“Look deeper through the telescope and do not be afraid when the stars collide towards the darkness, because sometimes the most beautiful things begin in chaos.”
“It is only after you have come to know the surface of things . . . that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.”
“I was just eight then, everything seemed to me a game, the battle of us children against the adults was the battle that all children fight. I didn’t understand that my brother’s determination concealed something deeper.”