Great Throughts Treasury

"Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. I?ve had many years of recovery and therapy, years filled with intimate and devoted friendships, yet I still struggle. I know that when someone gets a big slice of pie, it doesn?t mean there?s less for me. In fact, I know that there isn?t even a pie, that there?s plenty to go around, enough food and love and air. But I don?t believe it for a second. I secretly believe there?s a pie. I will go to my grave brandishing my fork."

"Jesus had an affinity for prisoners. He had been one, after all. He must have often felt anxiety and isolation in jail, but He identified with the prisoners. He made a point of befriending the worst and most hated, because His message was that no one was beyond reach of divine love, despite society's way of stating the opposite. God, what a nut. Finally we stood outside an inner gate, showed our IDs to the guards, and got our hands stamped with fluorescent ink. You don't glow, you don't go, said one cheerful, pockmarked guard, which was the best spiritual advice I'd had in a long time."

"Jesus is busy with his own stuff, and is not going to get involved in your little tug-of-war. Plus, don't forget, he has his own mother to deal with. She's all he can handle, as far as mothers go."

"Kids are hard -they drive you crazy and break your heart- whereas grandchildren make you feel great about life, and yourself, and your ability to love someone unconditionally, finally, after all these years."

"Joy is the best makeup."

"Jesus was soft on crime. He?d never have been elected anything."

"Kindness toward others and radical kindness to ourselves buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart, which is the greatest prize of all. Do you want this, or do you want to be right? Well, can I get back to you on that?"

"Just take it bird by bird."

"Laughter is carbonated holiness."

"Let?s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world?Try walking around with a child who?s going, ?Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky!? And the child points, and you look, and you see, and you start going, ?Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!? I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world ? present and in awe."

"Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, he said. Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe."

"Late Fragment And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. RAYMOND CARVER"

"Laughter is deliverance, bubbly salvation."

"Let's not get bogged down on whom or what we pray to. let's just say prayer is a communication from our hearts to the great mystery, or Goodness, or Howard; to the animating energy of love we are sometimes bold enough to believe in; to something unimaginably big, and not us. we could call this force Not Me, and Not Preachers Onstage with a Choir of 800. or for convenience we could just say God."

"Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe."

"Life does not seem to present itself to me for my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before putting it on a shelf somewhere."

"Life is change and what we need is muscle, flexibility, and awareness."

"Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions."

"Life is like a nice fresh batch of Swiss cheese. Note to self: savor the holes, too, like the spaces between musical notes."

"Life on earth is a head-scratcher for anyone who's paying attention. This place has been a bad match for me since I was four."

"Life is not a submarine."

"Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it."

"Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out."

"Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We?re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us."

"Living on earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time."

"Lighthouses don?t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."

"Look at us, he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down?s syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with themselves. I admired the picture and then handed it back to him. He stopped, so I stopped, too. He pointed to his own image. That, he said, is one cool man."

"Look back on your life and find something small that made a big difference."

"Look, if you don't have a bad attitude and lots of things wrong with you, no serious person is going to be interested. If you feel scared, outraged, confused most of the time, come on over. Have a seat."

"Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises."

"Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before."

"love Wendell Berry?s lines that it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."

"Maybe it is because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We?re walking temples of noise, and when you add the tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn?t get to any other way."

"Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation."

"May be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."

"Mattie was in love with Daniel, of course; this was the X within the circle on her map: I love Daniel."

"Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue"

"Maybe, I thought, after a few months of sobriety, you could successfully smoke marijuana again, or maybe every anniversary you got to have one glass of a perfectly chilled California Chardonnay."

"Maybe what you care most passionately about are fasting and high colonics--cappuccino enemas, say. This is fine, but we do not want you to write about them; we will secretly believe that you are simply spiritualizing your hysteria. There are millions of people already doing this at churches and New Age festivals across the land."

"Maybe what we say to each other is not so important after all, but just that we are alive together, and present for each other as best we can be."

"Mercy, grace, forgiveness, and compassion are synonyms, and the approaches we might consider taking when facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves ? our arrogance, greed, poverty, disease, prejudice. It includes everything out there that just makes us sick and makes us want to turn away, the idea of accepting life as it presents itself and doing goodness anyway, the belief that love and caring are marbled even into the worst life has to offer."

"Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgivable. Mercy brings us to the miracle of apology, given and accepted, to unashamed humility when we have erred or forgotten."

"Most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you."

"Most of us don?t notice how great we look until years, even decades later. Not long ago, I was looking at photos of myself at various ages and weights?way before the neckular deterioration began, way before the fanny pack of menopause?and I could see how gorgeous I must have looked to everyone else."

"Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus."

"Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift that your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths, divorces, rehab, and vacations, the solidarity you have shown one another. Every so often you realize that without all of them, your life would be barren and pathetic. It would be Death of a Salesman, though with e-mail and texting."

"Most of us have done fairly well in our lives. We learned how to run on that one wheel, but now we want a refund."

"Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained."

"Mostly things are not that way, that simple and pure, with so much focus given to each syllable of life as life sings itself. But that kind of attention is the prize. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass--seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one."

"Music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way."