Hasten slowly and ye shall soon arrive.
I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.
Don't let your habits become handcuffs
You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.
I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.
There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.
I made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer they'd slain, grace before supper, kneeling before bed. I was thinking that gratitude is too much absent in our lives now, and we need it back, even if it only takes the form of acknowledging the blue of a bowl against the red of cranberries.
Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent.
The State calls its own violence, law; but that of the individual, crime.
Who alone suffers suffers most i' th' mind, Leaving free things and happy shows behind; But then the mind much sufferance doth o'erskip When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.
Freedom can be gained only at the point of an IRA rifle, and I apologize to no one for saying that we support the freedom fighters of the IRA.