Appearance can always be changed, but the talent stays the same.
Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.
Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.
He [Christ] even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him - a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail.
I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.
I went to a party at the Playboy Mansion once. For a Halloween Party. And everyone wasn't in costume, or if they were they were little bunnies or something, and I went as Michael Jackson.
I'm not much of a crier but it is mildly soul-destroying and exposing to do something physical that you are terrible at in front of other people.
I don't know what's wrong with me, but like, the second I stop working, I have a panic attack, so it's good for me to be thinking of projects ahead of time and lining things up.
The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods.