Great Throughts Treasury

"We said that we believed that the truth would set us free, and the truth was that the Sunday-school staff was burned out, that there were almost no people of color, and that if we didn't get more help, we'd have to close down."

"We stitch together quilts of meaning to keep us warm and safe, with whatever patches of beauty and utility we have on hand."

"We think we?re humans having spiritual experiences, but we?re really spirits having human experiences,"

"we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can?t find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you?ll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you?ll see at least one next right step you can take."

"We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or being manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability...We do not wish to be crudely manipulated...We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater."

"We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature."

"We who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting, as a group, to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift. Your analyst is in on it, plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband; and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us. In announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty indeed against ourselves. But since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center, we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality then for the good of the collective."

"We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues."

"We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance."

"We?re bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below."

"We?re individuals in time and space who are often gravely lost, and then miraculously, in art, found."

"We write to expose the unexposed. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues. You can't do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can't find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder."

"We?re going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little."

"We?re so often rattled by lingering effects of trauma and paralyzing fear."

"We're all afraid of the same stuff. Mostly we're afraid that we're secretly not okay, that we're disgusting, or frauds, or about to be diagnosed with cancer. ... We want to teach you how to quiet the yammer ... how you can create comfort, inside and outside, how you can get warm, how you can feed yourself. And even learn to get through silence. ... There is a wilderness inside you, and a banquet. Both."

"What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can't have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath."

"What a mess we are, I thought. But this is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess. When I am well, I know not to mess with mess right away; I try to let silence and time work their magic."

"What if you wake up at sixty and realize that you forgot to wake up, and you never became the person you were born to be, and now your hair is falling out?"

"What if Sam's heart got broken again? As with most kids who are fourteen, it has been spackled and duct-taped and caulked back together many times as it is. [p. 258]"

"What finally helped was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in the winter. When"

"What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world?s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?"

"What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, Well, that's not very interesting, is it? And there's the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there's William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on. And there are also the dogs: let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained."

"What if you wake up some day, and you?re 65? and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?"

"What saved me was that I found gentle, loyal and hilarious companions, which is at the heart of meaning: maybe we don?t find a lot of answers to life?s tougher questions, but if we find a few true friends, that?s even better. They help you see who you truly are, which is not always the loveliest possible version of yourself, but then comes the greatest miracle of all?they still love you. They keep you company as perhaps you become less of a whiny baby, if you accept their help."

"What you're looking for is already inside you. You've heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can't buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or apply for it. The best job in the world can't give it to you. Neither can succes, or fame, or financial security - besides which, there ain't no such thing."

"What you're looking for is already inside you. You can't buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or apply for it. The best job in the world can't give it to you. Neither can success, or fame, or financial security."

"What?s the difference between you and God? God never thinks he?s you."

"What seems true is that something in life, on the highways or in our hearts, is always being installed, or being repaired, or being torn down for the next installation."

"When a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born?and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible."

"When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility."

"Whatever you come up with needs to suggest a voice that you are not trying to control. If you?re lost in the forest, let the horse find the way home. You have to stop directing, because you will only get in the way."

"When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens."

"whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you."

"When I feel like shoveling in food, the emptiness can be filled only with love."

"When I asked Father Tom where we find God in this present darkness, he said that God is in creation, and to get outdoors as much as you can."

"When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me NOT to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable. They were all running around in mazes like everyone else."

"When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me."

"when people don?t have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries."

"When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are."

"When Sam was six or so, he explained to me why we call God God: Because when you see something so great, you just go, 'God!"

"When Sam?s having a hard time and being a total baby about the whole thing, I feel so much frustration and rage and self-doubt and worry that it?s like a mini-breakdown. I feel like my mind becomes a lake full of ugly fish and big clumps of algae and coral, of feelings and unhappy memories and rehearsals for future difficulties and failures. I paddle around in it like some crazy old dog, and then I remember that there?s a float in the middle of the lake and I can swim out to it and lie down in the sun. That float is about being loved, by my friends and by God and even sort of by me. And so I lie there and get warm and dry off, and I guess I get bored or else it is human nature because after a while I jump back into the lake, into all that crap. I guess the solution is just to keep trying to get back to the float. This morning Sam woke at 4:00, so"

"When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we?re finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it?s down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is Wow, that?s a prayer."

"When we manage a flash of mercy for someone we don?t like, especially a truly awful person, including ourselves, we experience a great spiritual moment, a new point of view that can make us gasp. It gives us the chance to rediscover something both old and original, the sweet child in us who, all evidence to the contrary, was not killed off, but just put in the drawer. I realize now how desperately, how grievously, I have needed the necessary mercy to experience self-respect. It is what a lot of us were so frantic for all along, and we never knew it. We?ve tried almost suicidally for our whole lives to shake it from the boughs of the material world?s trees. But it comes from within, from love, from the flow of the universe; from inside the cluttered drawer."

"When we think we can do it all ourselves--fix, save, buy, or date a nice solution--it's hopeless. We're going to screw things up. We're going to get our tentacles wrapped around things and squirt our squiddy ink all over, so that there is even less visibility, and then we're going to squeeze the very life out of everything."

"When the ancient Egyptians finished building the pyramids, they had built the pyramids."

"When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down."

"When we agree to (or get tricked into) being part of something bigger than our own wired, fixated minds, we are saved. When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us."

"When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town."

"When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again."

"When you are on the knife?s edge?when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worse?you take in today."