Great Throughts Treasury

"For instance, I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don?t think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex."

"For a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death ? the greatest leisure of all."

"For some of us books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small flat rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world worlds that sing to you comfort and quiet or excite you."

"For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts."

"For some of us, books are as important as anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid pieces of paper unfolds world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet you or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of the things that you don't get in life...wonderful, lyrical language, for instance. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details duringthe course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean."

"For somebody to be on a search means he or she is involved with these subversive topics, reading and comparing notes with allies, asking questions, daydreaming, brooding. Even though you have homework to do."

"For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food."

"Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past."

"For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms."

"For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return."

"Forgiving people doesn?t necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you."

"Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places."

"Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare."

"God can't clean the house of you when you're still in it."

"Getting found almost always means being lost for a while"

"God has smiled on me, He has set me free. For us to acknowledge that we have been set free from toxic dependency, from crippling obsession or guilt, that we have been graced with the ability finally to forgive someone, is just plain astonishing."

"Grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on."

"Grace is a small white butterfly, and life is a semi-trailer careening up 101."

"Grace is having a commitment to- or at least an acceptance of- being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love."

"God loves you crazily, like I love you, Rae said, like a slightly overweight auntie, who sees only your marvelousness and need."

"Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep."

"Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, Well, that's pretty much what I thought I'd see, you are in trouble. At that point you have to ask yourself why you are even here. [...] Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business."

"Good dialogue encompasses both what is said and what is not said."

"God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person. If he hadn't the incarnation would mean nothing."

"Good news is that we?re all doomed, and you can give up any sense of control. Resistance is futile. Many things are going to get worse and weaker, especially democracy and the muscles in your upper arms. Most deteriorating conditions, though, will have to do with your family, the family in which you were raised and your current one. A number of the best people will have died, badly, while the worst thrive. The younger middle-aged people struggle with the same financial, substance, and marital crises that their parents did, and the older middle-aged people are, like me, no longer even late-middle-aged. We?re early old age, with failing memories, hearing loss, and gum disease. And also, while I hate to sound pessimistic, there are also new, tiny, defenseless people who are probably doomed, too, to the mental ruin of ceaseless striving. What most of us live by and for is the love of family?blood family, where the damage occurred, and chosen, where a bunch of really nutty people fight back together. But both kinds of families can be as hard and hollow as bone, as mystical and common, as dead and alive, as promising and depleted. And by the same token, only redeeming familial love can save you from this crucible, along with nature and clean sheets. A"

"Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily."

"Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence."

"Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity."

"Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination."

"Grace means suddenly you?re in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you to get there on your own."

"Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there."

"Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity."

"Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means that you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back."

"Gratitude is peace."

"Had to learn to be present without paying quite so much attention to my poor old over-amped mind, because this was the source of most of my unhappiness. And it still is. The"

"Growing up is not going nearly as efficiently as I had hoped."

"Having a great narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal. When you have a friend like this, she can say, Hey, I've got to drive up to the dump in Petaluma--wanna come along? and you honestly can't think of anything in the world you'd rather do."

"He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous."

"Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you."

"He had the time to hear, like a person who believed there was someone alive beneath the rubble of herself, who heard the soft sounds she could still make from the broken parts that had waited decades to be missed."

"He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are."

"He lost the great big outward thing, the good- looking package, and the real parts endured. They shine through like crazy, the brilliant mind and humor, the depth of generosity, the intense blue yes, those beautiful hands."

"Help. We can be freed from a damaging insistence on forward thrust, from a commitment to running wildly down a convenient path that might actually be taking us deeper into the dark forest. Praying Help means that we ask that Something give us the courage to stop in our tracks, right where we are, and turn our fixation away from the Gordian knot of our problems. We stop the toxic peering and instead turn our eyes to something else: to our feet on the sidewalk, to the middle distance, to the hills, whence our help comes?someplace else, anything else. Maybe this is a shift of only eight degrees, but it can be a miracle. It may be one of those miracles where your heart sinks, because you think it means you have lost. But in surrender you have won. And if it were me, after a moment, I would say, Thanks."

"He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu."

"Help for the sick and hungry, home for the homeless folk, peace in the world forever, this is my prayer, O Lord. Amen."

"Help is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom."

"Her message was always the same: God loved the world, all evidence to the contrary, and we must not give up on God."

"Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away."

"Her work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things -- a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer -- and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral."

"Here are the two best prayers I know: Help me help me, help me, and Thank you, thank you, thank you."