"The fact that he had foamed at the mouth immediately upon dying, indicated that he had a great back jam of wishes and desires and truths that were never spoken...out bubbled all the words he had swallowed when he was alive."
— Kaye Gibbons (Charms for the Easy Life)

"It took me a long time to learn that mistakes aren't good or bad,
they're just mistakes, and you clean them up and go on.


From 'A Virtuous Woman'."
— Kaye Gibbons

"You’ll find your one-in-a-million. But you’re sharp enough to know there’s no point in sludging through the first nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand, and ninety-nine to get to him."
— Kaye Gibbons (Charms for the Easy Life)

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image."
— Thomas Merton

"Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. The Seven Storey Mountain"
— Thomas Merton

"Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything."
— Thomas Merton

"To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succomb to violence."
— Thomas Merton

"If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men--you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead."
— Thomas Merton (Seeds of Contemplation)

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."
— Thomas Merton

"The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything."
— Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain)

"There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues."
— Thomas Merton

"Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men."
— Thomas Merton

"If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?"
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength."
— David James Duncan (The Brothers K)

"We hear nothing so clearly as what comes out of silence. "
— David James Duncan

"I'd taken a big fat crisis off my shoulders and loaded it all on Jesus, which seemed unfair in a way, but was exactly what the Bible recommended."
— David James Duncan

"And onto the screen pops a couple of housewives who start having a poop fit when they see how clean their new dish soap got the dinner plates"
— David James Duncan