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“The amount of muffin left stuck to the wrapper / when you open it / is the percent of your childhood / that was the way you remember it.”
― Mark Leidner, Returning the Sword to the Stone

“What is the whole of our existence," said Father Damien, practicing his sermon from the new pulpit, "but the sound of an appalling love?"

The snakes slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.

"What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don't mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given--children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps--we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes--those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God's love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God's love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know? ...

I am like you," said Father Damien to the snakes, "curious and small." He dropped his arms. "Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun's slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved."

The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

"If I am loved," Father Damien went on, "it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“The elevator had a carpeted floor and mirrors and indirect lighting. It rose as softly as the mercury in a thermometer.”
― Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business

“Consider suffering's simultaneous self-absorption and incitement to empathy. The former refigures the the self by reducing you to symptoms, conditions, enduring. The latter refigures the self by expanding it.”
― Zach Savich, Diving Makes the Water Deep