Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.
When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.
Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.
If we are lucky, we can give in and rest without feeling guilty. We can stop doing and concentrate on being.
The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. Though you may say the “I do” of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married.
One may have been a fool, but there's no foolishness like being bitter.
Each and every one of us has one obligation, during the bewildered days of our pilgrimage here: the saving of his own soul, and secondarily and incidentally thereby affecting for good such other souls as come under our influence.
I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
Spring seems far off, impossible, but it is coming. Already there is dusk instead of darkness at five in the afternoon; already hope is stirring at the edges of the day.
Changing husbands is only changing troubles.
I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.
The often heard lament, 'I have so little time,' gives the lie to the delusion that the daily is of little significance.
Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.
Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.
I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.
I write what I would like to read.
A short-lived fascination with another person may be exciting-I think we've all seen people aglow, in a state of being "in love with love"-but such an attraction is not sustainable over the long run. Paradoxically, human love is sanctified not in the height of attraction and enthusiasm, but in the everyday struggles of living with another person. It is not in romance but in routine that the possibilities for transformation are made manifest. And that requires commitment.
It's all so beautiful . . . the spring . . . and books and music and fires. . . . Why aren't they enough?
Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made
To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.
Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.
Men are more conventional than women and much slower to change their ideas.
The demon of acedia -- also called the noonday demon -- is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. . . . He makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and . . . he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself.
The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.
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