Ashok Rao

“My monk had to be a man of wide worldly experience and an inexhaustible fund of resigned tolerance for the human condition. His crusading and seafaring past, with all its enthusiasms and disillusionments, was referred to from the beginning. Only later did readers begin to wonder and ask about his former roving life, and how and why he became a monk. For reasons of continuity I did not wish to go back in time and write a book about his crusading days. Whatever else may be true of it, the entire sequence of novels proceeds steadily season by season, year by year, in a progressive tension which I did not want to break. But when I had the opportunity to cast a glance behind by way of a short story, to shed light on his vocation, I was glad to use it. So here he is, not a convert, for this is not a conversion. In an age of relatively uncomplicated faith, not yet obsessed and tormented by cantankerous schisms, sects and politicians, Cadfael has always been an unquestioning believer. What happens to him on the road to Woodstock is simply the acceptance of a revelation from within that the life he has lived to date, active, mobile and often violent, has reached its natural end, and he is confronted by a new need and a different challenge.”
― Ellis Peters, A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Today, my heart, like the front door, stands open for the first time in months.”
― Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems

“I-I've never seen anyone savor anything the way you do everything. You make me feel alive. Just being in your presence - it's addictive. You're addictive. It doesn't matter you're a witch. The way you see the world . . . I want to see it that way too. I want to be with you always, Lou. I never want to be parted from you again.”
― Shelby Mahurin, Serpent & Dove