True prayer is an awareness of our helpless need and an acknowledgment of divine adequacy.
When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.
It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.
Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
Discipline isn't about showing a dog who's boss; it's about taking responsibility for a living creature you have brought into your world.
. . . consciousness is a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending process of movement and unfoldment.
The trouble with emergencies is," she said, "that I always put on my finest underwear and then nothing happens.