Prayer is an expression of who we are…. We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.

What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.

The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls.

It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had...

A liar thinks everyone else lies? ... A thief thinks everyone else is stealing from him? ... A philanderer thinks everyone else is philandering.

Many of Juan Diego's demons had been his childhood companions - he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.

Until we have met the monsters in ourselves, we keep trying to slay them in the outer world. And we find that we cannot. For all darkness in the world stems from darkness in the heart. And it is there...

What role was she expected to play in his life, and more important, in her own?

My life has been of but little worth mostly filled up with vanity.

Keegan: You feel at home in the world then? Broadbent: Of course. Don't you

To work here with a good heart I'd been forced to smother the snob in me.

Anne Lamott advises, Try not to compare your insides with other people's outsides.

I mean "God" as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy...

I started out as an idea, but I ended up something more. Not much more to be honest. It's not like I grow up to become some great war hero or any sort of all-important savior...

Phury... I was going to come find you before I left. With a towel under his chin, Z looked at his reflection in the mirror, seeing his new yellow eyes. He thought of the arc of his life and knew most...

Why do you do these things to yourself? Not just what you did to the window, but the way you talked to Clary. What are you punishing yourself for? You can't help how you feel.

Some part of me instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood this pain, never imagining that I would someday look in the mirror and see their sadness and insanity in my own eyes.

The measuring and mixing always smoothed out her thinking processes - nothing was as calming as creaming butter - and when the kitchen was warm from the oven overheating and the smell of baking...

Guilt is like a shadow that only you can see. It is always there. It can drown you. It is enveloping and impossible to escape from.

At twenty - two, I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself.

Why are you being so cruel? Honestly? Because I believed your bullshit lies when you spewed them and I don't often make that mistake. I should have listened to myself and known that in the end, you're...

On reflection, though, it struck her as dishonest, like serving people ice cream on their first night at the fat farm. Hey, have some more hot fudge! You're gonna love it here at Camp Lose - a - Lot!

Rachel, you need to stop overthinking or you'll ruin everything - said her voice of gray silk with the rain in the background - The question isn't whether we can do it, but whether we can live with...

always meant to run away someday.

You're not a monster. You're a mirror.

How wearisome to let one's existence become something absolutely dependent on someone else's feelings; to have no option but to feel, to love a little too, whether or not it is reciprocated.

Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not to holiness. Because holiness is about union, and purity is about separation.

When your words are futile, you're better off keeping them to yourself

But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn't dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I'd managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter,...

Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late I have loved you! You were within, but I was without.