Great Throughts Treasury

"His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible."

"Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes- in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions."

"Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."

"Here is the best true story on giving I know, and it was told by Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre. An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia, and he was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers, and if so, he could be the blood donor. They asked him if they could test his blood. He said sure. So they did and it was a good match. Then they asked if he would give his sister a pint of blood, that it could be her only chance of living. He said he would have to think about it overnight. The next day he went to his parents and said he was willing to donate the blood. So they took him to the hospital where he was put on a gurney beside his six-year-old sister. Both of them were hooked up to IVs. A nurse withdrew a pint of blood from the boy, which was then put in the girl?s IV. The boy lay on his gurney in silence while the blood dripped into his sister, until the doctor came over to see how he was doing. Then the boy opened his eyes and asked, How soon until I start to die?"

"His cell phone?the adolescent?s pacemaker."

"Honey, I said, what'd you just say?"

"Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can?t short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can?t patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action."

"How alive am I willing to be?"

"Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us."

"Hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously. So"

"I am all the ages I've ever been."

"Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don?t make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, You wouldn?t understand. And we don?t understand a lot of things. But we learn that people are very disappointing, and that they break our hearts, and that very sweet people will be bullied, and that we will be called to survive unsurvivable losses, and that we will realize with enormous pain how much of our lives we?ve already wasted with obsessive work or pleasing people or dieting. We will see and read about deprivation and barbarity beyond our ability to understand, much less process. Side by side with all that, we will witness transformation, people finding out who they were born to be, before their parents pretzelized them into high achievers and addicts and charming, wired robots."

"How are we going to get through this craziness? I asked. There was silence for a moment. Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, he said."

"However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff."

"I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen."

"I believe that when all is said and done, all you can do is to show up for someone in crisis, which seems so inadequate. But then when you do, it can radically change everything. Your there-ness, your stepping into a scared [person's] line of vision, can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding."

"I bet I'm beginning to make some parents nervous - here I am, bragging of being a dropout, and unemployable, and about to make a pitch for you to follow your creative dreams, when what parents want is for their children to do well in their field, to make them look good, and maybe also to assemble a tasteful fortune."

"I came here with a huge open heart, like a big, sweet dog, and I still have one. But some days the only thing that can cheer me up is something bad happening to someone I hate, preferably if it went viral and the photo of the person showed hair loss and perhaps the lifelong underuse of sunscreen. My heart still leaps to see this. I often recall the New Yorker cartoon of one dog saying to the other: ?It?s not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail.? This is the human condition."

"I am positive of only a few things in life, and one is that if you want to have a decent middle and old age, you have to get exercise almost every day."

"I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place..."

"I can be a hero in my storm, which is where I found a sense of value as a child, as the tense little EMT in a damaged family. Crisis, self-centered fear, and saving people were home for me, with a wet bar serving up adrenaline. The quiet, tranquil room of just being was boarded up. But love reaches out and reaches out and reaches out. It is staggering that it is always giving me another chance, another day, over and over and over."

"I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood."

"I can teach them little things that may not be in any of the great books on writing. For instance, I?m not sure if anyone else has mentioned that December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It is a month of Mondays. Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk."

"I carry a secret sense of accomplishment around with me, like a radium pack implanted near my heart that now leaches a quiet sense of relief through my system."

"I danced alone for a couple of years, and came to believe that I might not ever have a passionate romantic relationship?might end up alone! I?d always been terrified of this. But I?d rather not ever be in a couple, or ever get laid again, than be in a toxic relationship. I spent a few years celibate. It was lovely, and it was sometimes lonely. I had surrendered; I?d run out of bullets. I learned to be the person I wished I?d meet, at which point I found a kind, artistic, handsome man. When we get out of bed, we hold our lower backs, like Walter Brennan, and we laugh, and bring each other the Advil."

"I decided to go to the beach at San Quentin, and practice living as if today was one of the precious few left to me. What a concept."

"I decided to start from scratch, with a simple prayer: Hi! I said. Someone or something hears. I don?t know much about its nature, only that when I cry out, it hears me and moves closer to me, and I don?t feel so alone. I feel better. And I felt better that morning, starting over. No shame in that?Saint Augustine said that you have to start your relationship with God all over from the beginning, every day. Yesterday?s faith does not wait for you like a dog with your slippers and the morning paper in its mouth. You seek it, and in seeking it, you find it."

"I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees."

"I did not mean to be a Christian. I have been very clear about that. My first words upon encountering the presence of Jesus for the first time 12 years ago, were, I swear to God, I would rather die. I really would have rather died at that point than to have my wonderful brilliant left-wing non-believer friends know that I had begun to love Jesus. I think they would have been less appalled if I had developed a close personal friendship with Strom Thurmond. At least there is some reason to believe that Strom Thurmond is a real person. You know, more or less. But I never felt like I had much choice with Jesus; he was relentless. I didn?t experience him so much as the hound of heaven, as the old description has it, as the alley cat of heaven, who seemed to believe that if it just keeps showing up , mewling outside your door, you?d eventually open up and give him a bowl of milk. Of course, as soon as you do, you are fucked, and the next thing you know, he?s sleeping on your bed every night, and stepping on your chest at dawn to play a little push-push."

"I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects."

"I do know you are not what you look like, or how much you weigh, or how you did in school, or whether you start a job next Monday or not. Spirit isn't what you do, it's . . . well, again, I don't actually know. They probably taught this junior year at Goucher; I should've stuck around. But I know that you feel best when you're not doing much - when you're in nature, when you're very quiet or, paradoxically, listening to music."

"I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways."

"I don?t know Who?or what?put the question, I don?t know when it was put. I don?t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone?or Something?and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. ?DAG HAMMARSKJ™LD, Markings"

"I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. It can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or in tiny tastes."

"I don't know where to start, one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down."

"I don?t know why life isn?t constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and out kids do scary things and our parents get old and don?t always remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll. I don?t know why it?s not more like it is in the movies, why things don?t come out neatly and lessons can?t be learned when you?re in the mood for learning them, why love and grace often come in such motley packaging."

"I felt changed and a little crazy. But though I was still like a stained and slightly buckled jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing, now there were at least a few border pieces in place."

"I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child."

"I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it, and I don't think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect."

"I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me."

"I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up."

"I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing."

"I had enough to wrestle, wrangle and settle back into, with this one life of mine. Besides, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution."

"I had to grip myself by the wrist not to pitch one good idea after another at them. . . . I writhed with the effort to stay silent? Since Jax's birth my ideas about what would be best for everyone usually got in the way. Life is already an obstacle course, and when you're adding your own impediments (thinking they're helping), you really crazy it up. You make it harder to even just cross the room. You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course."

"I hate how long it takes to feel radical, militantly maternal self-acceptance."

"I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns."

"I have become more successful in my forties, but that pales in comparison with the other gifts of my current decade -- how kind to myself I have become, what a wonderful, tender wife I am to myself, what a loving companion. I prepare myself tubs of hot salt water at the end of the day, and soak my tired feet. I run interference for myself when I am working, like the wife of a great artist would -- 'No, I'm sorry, she can't come. She's working hard these days, and needs a lot of down time.' I live by the truth that 'No' is a complete sentence. I rest as a spiritual act."

"I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don?t love?until a few years ago, I had no idea that you could have cellulite on your stomach?but not only do I get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side. Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? You bet I would. That is why it?s such a blessing that I?m not left to my own devices."

"I have gotten lost all of my life, maybe more than most, and been found every time."

"I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn't good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I'd told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can't get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can't even pretend that you have, you shouldn't show up. You should stay home, because it's hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed. So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed."