All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.

Because the darkness is never so distant,
And there is never much time for the arrogant
Spirit to flutter its wings,
Or the broken bone to rejoice, or the cruel to cry
For Him whose property is always to have mercy, the author
And giver of all good things.


-W.H. Auden, At the Grave of Henry James

"To speak, to speak is what humankind has most on heart."

-Ancient Sumerian Proverb

Well he stormed with his feet
And he clapped with his hands,
He summoned all of his joy when he laughed
It suffered all of his joy when he cried.

Well in war he was a tiger
When it was over like a dove,
He summoned all of his strength in the climb
It suffered all of his strength in the fall.

He put his trust in a higher power
He held his power like a holy grail,
He summoned all of his faith in the lifting
It suffered all of his faith in the fail.

-M. Ward, Requiem

Come, ye weary, heavy-laden
Lost and ruined by the fall,
If you tarry 'til you're better
You will never come at all.

-Joseph Hart

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not. But the same thing happens in our private prayers.”

-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character..."
___________

The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death.
___________

"Dear Joe, I hope you will have children to love, and that some little fellow will sit in this chimney corner of a winter night, who may remind you of another little fellow gone out of it for ever. And now, though I know you have already done it in your own kind hearts, pray tell me, both, that you forgive me! Pray let me hear you say the words, that I may carry the sound of them away with me, and then I shall be able to believe that you can trust me, and think better of me, in the time to come!"

-Great Expectations

I walked away at a good pace, thinking it was easier to go than I had supposed it would be. But the village was very peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all beyond was so unknown and great, that in a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears.

So subdued I was by those tears, that when I was on the coach, and it was clear of the town, I deliberated with an aching heart whether I would not get down when we changed horses and walk back, and have another evening at home, and a better parting. We changed, and I had not made up my mind, and still reflected for my comfort that it would be quite practicable to get down and walk back, when we changed again.

It was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.

THIS IS THE END OF THE FIRST STAGE OF PIP'S EXPECTATIONS

-Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

-Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

-subversive cross stitch
-via new on my rss feed

all you need to be emergent - ASBO Jesus

In the solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls - grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

-Thomas Hardy, The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)

Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, James A.M. Whistler, 1875

is Thy love indeed
A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?

-Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven

A man who long ago learned to hold each act in light of the distant life in which he would repent it, who for years anticipated and even treasured, with a kind of half-conscious, terrible clarity, the self as it would emerge from the wreckage it created; a man grown equanimous and wise, devoid of ambition now but, what luck, replete with everything ambition brings - this house, these admirers, regret softened by renown, and this moment in which to gather his brood of wounds around him with an almost paternal pride, as a lovely elegiac light fills the room and all the intact past stands plain as a lawn. Spare me. A man can vanish into what he's done, give himself so utterly to his actions that he becomes, not the wise survivor crawling from the chaos of his deeds, but the smooth and empty shell they cast up. Who would believe this hollow noise is the sea?

-Christian Wiman (144)

"A Song to Pass the Time"
by Bright Eyes
(my favorite song, though I have yet to hear it)

There is a middle-aged woman dragging her feet.
She carries baskets of clothes to a laundromat.
While the Mexican children kick rocks into the street
and they laugh in a language I don't understand.
But I love them.
Why do I love them?
So the neighborhood is dimming as I smoke on the porch
and watch the people as they pass enclosed inside their cars.
And on their faces just anger or disappointment.
I start wishing there was something I could offer them.
A consolation, what could I offer them?
When they are sad in their suburbs, robots water the lawn
and everything they touch gets dusted spotless,
so they start to believe that they haven't touched anything at all
while the cars in the driveway only multiply.
They are lost in their houses.
I have heard them sing in the shower
and making speeches to their sister on the telephone.
Saying, "You come home.
Darling, you come here.
Don't stay so far away from me."
This weather has me wanting love more tangible,
something I can hold because it's getting cold.
So lets hold up our fists to the flame in the sky
to block out the light that is reaching for our eyes
because it would blind us.
It will blind us.
Now I have locked my actions in the grooves of routine.
So I may never be free of this apathy.
But I wait for a letter that is coming to me.
She sends me pictures of the ocean in an envelope.
So there still is hope.
Yes, I can be healed.
There is someone looking for what I concealed in my secret drawer,
in my pockets deep, you will find the reasons that I can't sleep
and you will still want me.
But will you still want me?
Well, I say come for the week. You can sleep in my bed.
And then pass through my life like a dream through my head.
It will be easy. I will make it easy.
But all I have for the moment is a song to pass the time.
A melody to keep me from worrying.
Oh, some simple progression to keep my fingers busy.
And some words that are sure to come back to me and they will be laughing.
My mediocrity. My mediocrity.

'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.'

'I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve.'

-Robert Frost, The Death of a Hired Man

“After forty years of writing books, I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.”

-Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

“What we call church is often a conspiracy of cordiality. Pastors learn to pacify rather than preach to their Ananiases and Sapphiras. We say we do it out of "love." Usually, we do it as a means of keeping everyone as distant from everyone else as possible. You don’t get into my life and I will not get into yours.”

-Stanley Hauerwas

Real? Who wants real?
I know I don't want it. I want magic!
Magic! Yes! That's what I want!
That's what I try to give to people.
I do mis-
Represent things.
I don't tell
The truth. But I tell
What ought to be the truth . . .
What it ought to be.
Yes, magic. Magic's what I try to give to people.
If that's a sin,
If that is such a sin
Then let me be damned for it!
Don't turn on that light.
It'll all look so ugly in that light.
Why not see by candlelight . . .
Or moonlight, or by starlight?
They are bright enough to see by . . .
Sometimes too bright.
Don't turn on that light.

-I Want Magic!

A loss of something ever felt I –
The first that I could recollect
Bereft I was - of what I knew not
Too young that any should suspect

A Mourner walked among the children
I notwithstanding went about
As one bemoaning a Dominion
Itself the only Prince cast out –

Elder, Today, a session wiser
And fainter, too, as Wiseness is --
I find myself still softly searching
For my Delinquent Palaces --

And a Suspicion, like a Finger
Touches my Forehead now and then
That I am looking oppositely
For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven –

-Emily Dickinson

It is wrong to use terms that imply those labeled are defined by their actions or feelings.

-internet monk

Every Riven Thing

by Christian Wiman

God goes, belonging to every riven thing He's made
Sing his being simply by being
The thing it is:
Stone and tree and sky,
Man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing He's made,
Means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
Trying to will himself into the stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing He's made
There is given one shade
Shaped exactly to the thing itself:
Under the tree a darker tree;
Under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
The things that bring Him near,
Made the mind that makes Him go.
A part of what man knows,
Apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing He's made.

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”

- Victor Hugo

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

-John Keats, from Ode to a Grecian Urn

If loving her is heartache for me,
And if holding her means I have to bleed
Then I am a martyr, and love is to blame.
She is the healing, and I am the pain.

-Trading Yesterday

The teacher’s job, in Keats’s terms, is to point you through the vale of soul-making. We’re born once, into nature and into the culture that quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we’re granted such grace, we’re born again.

-William Deresiewicz

The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.

-W.H. Auden (yes, again)

I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ - and certainly not for Christ which I've heard some zealots claim. I'm not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament, and I've not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church. I'm somewhat familiar with the passages from the Bible that appear in the Book of Common Prayer; I read my prayer book often, and my Bible only on holy days - the prayer book is so much more orderly.

-A Prayer for Owen Meany

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

-George Herbert, from The Agony

I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it.

-Christian Wiman, Gazing Into the Abyss

-The Nietzsche Family Circus

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not-
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught-
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

-Shelley, from To a Sky-Lark

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

-Sidney J. Harris

-photo

He praised his God
for the expertise
of his torturer and his chef.
---
Lonely he may be
but, each time he bolts his door
the last thing at night,
his heart rejoices: "No one
can interfere with me now."
-
He woke in the small hours,
dismayed by a wilderness
of hostile thoughts.
-
Thoughts of his own death,
like the distant roll
of thunder at a picnic.

-W.H. Auden

A key to the street each convict has,
but the Asphalt Lands are lawless marches
where gangs clash and cops turn
robber-barons: reckless he
who walks after dark in that wilderness.

-W.H. Auden, from City Without Walls

-post secret

“Our moral judgments and evaluations, too, are only images and fantasies about a physiological process that is unknown to us... all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text.”

- Nietzsche

"the fiction writer does not need to solve a problem so much as state the problem correctly." (197)

-Terry Bain

Letters For God.

The Israeli postal service sorts over 2 million pieces of mail daily, and inevitably some of those letters come addressed to God. Rather than consign the letters to bins of undeliverable mail, letters addressed to God are collected and deposited at the Western Wall a few times a year.
Postal authorities consider the letters private conversations with God and do not open them. Letters come from all corners of the globe,

Birth name:

Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland

(someone's indecisive)

This guy writes the longest sentences ever:

Faith is precisely this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal and is justified over against the latter not as subordinate but superior to it, yet in such a way, mind you, that it is the single individual who, after having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now through the universal becomes the single individual who as the particular is superior to it; [faith is this paradox] that the single individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.

-Kierkegaard as Johann de silencio

Brian McLaren's article on Wheaton.

Married to the Sea

1.	collateral misinformation
	When someone alters a Wikipedia article to win a specific argument, anyone who reads the false article before the "error" is corrected suffers from collateral misinformation. I changed the scientific classification of red foxes last night in order to win an argument with Judy. I hope some stupid High School student didn't suffer from collateral misinformation.

Prayer to Every God
(from somewhere in the non-Israelite ancient Near East,
I'm confused by footnotes.)

The transgression I have committed I do not know;
The sin I have done I do not know;
The forbidden thing I have eaten I do not know;
The prohibited place on which I have set foot I do not know;
The god whom I know or do not know has oppressed me;I am troubled, I am overwhelmed, I cannot see.

Man is dumb; he knows nothing;
Mankind, everyone that exists-what does he know?
Whether he is committing sin or doing good, he does not even know.

Father at the wars,
Mother, tongue-tied with shyness,
struggling to tell him
the Facts of Life he dared not
tell her he knew already.

-W.H. Auden

History should not be seen naively as an attempt to recount what really happened. The Epistemological question concerns the extent to which we could ever know what really happened... In one sense one could perhaps go so far as to claim that there is no such thing as history, only the recounted interpretation of the past.

-Dr. John H. Walton

Marc Johns

So if the devil wear Prada,
Adam Eve wear Nada,
I'm in between, but way more fresher.

-Kanye West

Portrait of Igor Stravinsky by Picasso

prayer
by Aaron Belz

Shall I
compare
myself
to a dog?

If so,
it’s true—
sometimes
I paw my
master’s
leg. And

sometimes
he plays
with me.

It would be difficult to discuss with ancients the concepts of divine intervention, because in their worldview deity was too integrated into the cosmos to intervene in it. For the most part, deity is on the inside, not the outside. All experience was religious experience, all law was spiritual in nature, all duties were duties to the gods, all events had deity as their cause. Life was religion and religion could not be compartmentalized within life...

In the ancient world something came into existence when it was separated out as a distinct entity, given a function, and given a name.

-Dr. John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought

obstaculum

Have daylight mercy on my midnight soul.

-Frederick Buechner, Godric

Droid Rage

Newsworthy

The Broken Covenant
from the book of Jeremiah

Like a cage full of birds,
their houses are full of deceit;
therefore they have become great and rich;
they have grown fat and sleek.
They know no bounds in deeds of evil;
they judge not with justice
the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper,
and they do not defend the rights of the needy.
Shall I not punish them for these things?
declares the Lord,
and shall I not avenge myself
on a nation such as this?
An appalling and horrible thing
has happened in the land:
the prophets prophesy falsely,
and the priests rule at their direction;
my people love to have it so,
but what will you do when the end comes?

They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
saying, 'Peace, peace,'
when there is no peace.

The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; with a point of diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their heart

The battle spread over the face of all the country, and the forest devoured more people that day than the sword.

-here.

Remember, my friends, what a handful of trumpet players
did to the famous fabled walls of Jericho,
oh, billiard parlor walls come a-tumblin' down!
-The Music Man

photo

Threadless

“We for the most part shy off being human because if we are really human we will be crucified.”
-Herbert McCabe

(via I have no idea why I subscribe to this blog... it's ...boring)

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
- James Joyce

the main problem at any high school is not substance abuse, although that is the message our students unfortunately get. It is not sex, either. It is a lack of belief that what is being done is important, and students and teachers are both culpable.

-Aaron Belz
via an ecstasy of particulars

Great Mugging Escapes—No. 204: The War on Terror
By Pasha Malla

...See that light glinting up there by the water tower? That's "the Claw." He's got a hook for a hand—lost it in Belfast in the '80s. I give the signal and he'll put a bullet through your ear. Roger that, Red Dog. Two minutes to green light. Lock and load. Over.

Letter of Recommendation for Rick Stoeckel, Who Was Homeschooled

By Rick Stoeckel

...When I asked Ricky's father for a comment to include in this recommendation, he stated, "Ricky's all right." If you knew Ricky's father, you would realize what a great accolade that is. I second that notion. For all his faults and imperfections and disappointments and failures, our Ricky is all right.

If you have any questions regarding Ricky's worthiness or character, please feel free to contact me. I am available anytime except Saturday mornings, when I go grocery shopping, and Monday nights, when Ricky's father and I hold our own PTA meetings: just the two of us. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Rick's Mom

God has put this Word into the mouth of others in order that it may be communicated to us. When one person is struck by the Word, he speaks it to others. God has willed that we should seek and find his living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth.

He needs a brother as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain; his brother’s is sure.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
via Elanor

"Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama."

The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.

-Lyndon B. Johnson

KNOW then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,	5
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;	10
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;	15
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! -Alexander Pope (I've never understood humanism better than after reading this)

The first Photoshop icon

People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

-David Mamet

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

-E. M. Cioran

The great writers usually break a few rules, and the greater the writer the larger the transgressions...

Forgive me if I got carried away back there. Sometimes we scribblers do indeed become drunk with power.

-Alexander Steele

All books are either dreams or swords.

-Amy Lowell

You shall love your crooked neighbour

  With your crooked heart.

-W.H. Auden

The Temptation of Adam
by Josh Ritter

...I never had to learn to love her like I learned to love the Bomb,
she just came along and started to ignore me...

We could hold each other close and stay up every night
looking up into the dark like it's the night sky.
Pretend this giant missile is an old oak tree instead
and carve our name in hearts into the warhead.

Oh Marie there's something tells me things just won't work out above,
that our love would live a half-life on the surface.
So at night while you are sleeping
I hold you closer just because
as our time grows short I get a little nervous.

I think about the Big One, W.W.I.I.I.
Would we ever really care the world had ended?
You could hold me here forever like you're holding me tonight
I think about that great big button and I'm tempted.

14

Wealth and Religiosity
via More than 95 Theses

-via Jesus Creed

Photo

By Small and Small: Midnight to 4 A.M.
by Jack Gilbert

For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.

Each one of us has... an inner life story that we spend all our lives telling to ourselves alone.... our inner life story is the content of our most private level of consciousness. It is the actual reason, the final basis of the decisions we make--decisions that are often so baffling to others.

-John Charles Cooper, Fantasy and the Human Spirit

Tony Jones' banned lecture at Wheaton.

-via iamjoshbrown

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
but is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor even chaste, except you ravish me.

-John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV

-photo

“Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

-T.S. Eliot
Thomas in Murder in the Cathedral

Unholy we sang this morning, and prayed
as if we were not broken, crooked
the Christ-figure hung, splayed
on bloodied beams above us;
devious God, dweller in shadows,
mercy on us;
immortal, cross-shattered Christ—
your gentling grace down upon us.

-"Mercy" from Manhandling the Deity, by John F. Deane

-photo

a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting
- three hundred million people all with the same face.

-George Orwell, 1984

Photo - BenGood

But today, if you will hear His voice,
Today He will hear you.
He brought light out of darkness,
Not out of a lesser light:
He can bring thy summer out of winter,
Tho' thou have no spring.

-John Donne, from a sermon preached in 1624, put to music by Imogen Holst

Great is the Lord!
The dawn is but a pale reflection of the hem of his garments

-Franz Schubert, Gott in der Natur

Whenever I try to Read through the Bible in a Year, I Always Get Stuck in Leviticus

Eden, the original sacred space, is restored in us as God's presence has taken up his dwelling in his people... Keep the space pure. (123)

-Old Testament Today

The true poem is the poet's mind.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

jan von holleben

On Turning Ten
by Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

I don’t believe in the God who is so identified with a denomination that someone can say “We speak for God,” and no one laughs.

-Internet Monk

- Vincent Laforet, who has an uncanny way of making us all look like toys.

"For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand."

-C.S. Lewis

"Meanwhile, where is God?...But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?"

-Lewis again, A Grief Observed

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who walk into a room and say, There you are and those who say, Here I am.

-Abigail Van Buren

"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about."

-W. H. Auden

"I’m so optimistic that I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion...

...it is no longer feasible for guardians of religious traditions to protect their young from exposure to the kinds of facts (and, yes, of course, misinformation and junk of every genre) that gently, irresistibly undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance. The religious fervor of today is a last, desperate attempt by our generation to block the eyes and ears of the coming generations, and it isn’t working."

-Daniel C. Dennett