"Jesus didn't come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true."

"God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible."

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's hunger meet."

"There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three."

"It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence."

"What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us."

"Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical."

"To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift."

"In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us."

"If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths."

"You have to suffer in order to be beautiful."

"... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both..."

"Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?"

"O thou who art the sparrow's friend," he said, "have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen"

"To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge."

"So ever and again young Godric’s dreams well up to flood old Godric’s prayers, or prayers and dreams reach God in such a snarl he has to comb the tangle out, and who knows which he counts more dear."

"Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men."

"The place God calls us to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet."

"With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other's cards."

"He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die."

"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent."

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."

"It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon."

"One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God."

"When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24) he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia."

"This side of Nirvana, there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know."

"Vocation is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

"It is out of the absence of God that God makes himself present,"

"It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around..."

"I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its kidneys as whose eyes, I suppose, would not."

"Because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known"

"We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors."

"The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews."

"Life without death has become as unthinkable to me as day without night or waking without sleep."

"I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real."

"The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory."

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; Freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be."

"Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations."

"Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours."

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone... they will be forced to deal with pain."

"When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living."

"The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

"Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance."

"Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden."

"Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."

"It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian."

"It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless."

"The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly."

"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

"If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not."