Quotes from Robert Hellenga

Fussing over food was important. It gave a shape to the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner; beginning, middle, end.

People say that God works in mysterious ways when they really mean that life, or something in their own lives, doesn't make any sense, but I think that's wrong. I think it means that we can't make any sense out of life until we give up our deepest hopes, until we stop trying to arrange everything to suit us. But once we do, or are forced to . . . That's what's mysterious.

Sometimes it takes a little jolt to make us appreciate what we've got.

Death was a lens that would reveal things as they really were: what was important would assume its true importance; what was unimportant would recede into the shadows.

There was a time I didn't know your name Why should I worry, cry in vain but now she's gone, and I don't worry cause I'm sittin' on top of the world.

The only meaning our lives have is the meaning we give them.

She heard melody and harmony and counterpoint; he heard something calling him from far, far away.

I could almost hear my books in the living room, boarded up in their Jefferson bookcases, crying out to me, like someone stuck in an elevator, or a coffin: "Let us out of here. We're suffocating. Let us out. Let us OUT!" And I started to laugh. "I'll be down in a minute," I said.

Sometimes pain is God's megaphone, his only way to get our attention.

Nah," I said to myslef, crumpling up the note, "Non vale il pene".

However far back you go you will find all experiences linked by slender threads.

He knew that he'd known her for less than a week, but now that she was gone he was continually probing his feelings for her, the way he might probe a sore tooth with his tongue, engaging her in imaginary conversations, imagining her saying such delightful things.

The advice he reads in Ann Landers – good advice as long as you don't need it, perfectly sensible as long as you don't have any use for it.

What to do with the past? There was so much of it.

You won't know true happiness ... till you give up your heart's desire.

He wondered what you had to do to lose your driver's license in Italy.