The Book of Hours Quotes

“Put out my eyes, and I can see you still; slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet; and without any feet can go to you; and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.”

“You, God, who live next door-- If at times, through the long night, I trouble you with my urgent knocking-- this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.”

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.”

“God, who can hold you? To yourself alone belonging, by no owner’s hand disturbed, you are like unripened wine that unperturbed grows ever sweeter and is all alone.”

“You love most of all those who need you as they need a crowbar or a hoe. You have not grown old, and it is not too late To dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret.”

“I read it in your word, and learn it from the history of the gestures of your warm wise hands, rounding themselves to form and circumscribe the shapes that are to come.”

“I am the rest between two notes which, struck together, sound discordantly, because death’s note would claim a higher key. But in the dark pause, trembling, the notes meet, harmonious. And the song continues sweet.”

“You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything the darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up.”

“So like children, we begin again... to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”

“I know you’re all alone in that room. If you should be thirsty, there’s no one to get you a glass of water. I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign! I’m right here...”

“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.”

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”

“I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.”

“You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.”

“So many live on and want nothing And are raised to the rank of prince By the slippery ease of their light judgments But what you love to see are faces that do work and feel thirst.”

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.”

“And if at night one holds you closely pressed, locked in his prayers so you cannot stray, …..you are the guest …..who comes, but not to stay.”

“I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.”

“God, do not lose your equilibrium. Even he who loves you and discerns your face in darkness, when he trembles like a light you breathe upon, — he cannot own you quite.”

“I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”