“There are many injustices that will simply never be made right, and to expect otherwise is to set yourself up to be consumed by frustration.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“To expect a hospitable world is hubris. Instead, expect the opposite. Expect a world that may destroy you at its whim at any moment.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Conversion must result in a change of attitude and values. Otherwise, it is no conversion. If you say, “I now love Jesus, but I still hate certain people,” you do not really love Jesus.”
Source: The Journey: Spiritual Growth in Galatians and Philippians
“It takes two of us to discover truth: one to utter it and one to understand it.”
Source: Sand and Foam
“He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his loneliness pondered always on the same insoluble question: "What is this? Can it be that it is Death?" And the inner voice answered: Yes, it is Death. "Why these sufferings?" And the voice answered, For no reason—they just are so.”
Source: The Death of Ivan Ilych
“The deaths of writers aren’t special deaths; they just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa, struck down – who can tell at this distance? – by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some malign axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort – to be crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing a new play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the slow decline of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c’s turning to t’s in his mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard mask of imbecility (his brother’s phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed visions and panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother’s words again) like a saw cutting through wet wood. I think of Maupassant slowly disintegrating from the same disease, transported in a strait-jacket to the Passy sanatorium of Dr Blanche, who kept the Paris salons entertained with news of his celebrated client; Baudelaire dying just as inexorably, deprived of speech, arguing with Nadar about the existence of God by pointing mutely at the sunset; Rimbaud, his right leg amputated, slowly losing all feeling in the limbs that remained, and repudiating, amputating his own genius –‘Merde pour la poésie’; Daudet ‘vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five’, his joints collapsing, able to become bright and witty for an evening by giving himself five morphine injections in a row, tempted by suicide –But one doesn’t have the right.”
Source: Flaubert's Parrot
“The Wound
I climbed to the crest,
And, fog-festooned,
The sun lay west
Like a crimson wound:
Like that wound of mine
Of which none knew,
For I’d given no sign
That it pierced me through.”
Source: Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses
“The Dead Man Walking
They hail me as one living,
But don't they know
That I have died of late years,
Untombed although?
I am but a shape that stands here,
A pulseless mould,
A pale past picture, screening
Ashes gone cold.
Not at a minute's warning,
Not in a loud hour,
For me ceased Time's enchantments
In hall and bower.
There was no tragic transit,
No catch of breath,
When silent seasons inched me
On to this death ....
— A Troubadour-youth I rambled
With Life for lyre,
The beats of being raging
In me like fire.
But when I practised eyeing
The goal of men,
It iced me, and I perished
A little then.
When passed my friend, my kinsfolk,
Through the Last Door,
And left me standing bleakly,
I died yet more;
And when my Love's heart kindled
In hate of me,
Wherefore I knew not, died I
One more degree.
And if when I died fully
I cannot say,
And changed into the corpse-thing
I am to-day,
Yet is it that, though whiling
The time somehow
In walking, talking, smiling,
I live not now.”
Source: Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses
“In country after country we see white men building empires on the sweat and suffering of colored people.”
Source: Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
“All of life comes the way of pain. Birth, death, war. Even the food we eat cost someone a day’s toil. I suppose God gives us the greatest treasures to compensate for the suffering.”
Source: Rescuing Rose