Quotes from Anne D. LeClaire

Every soul innately yearns for stillness, for a space, a garden where we can till, sow, reap, and rest, and by doing so come to a deeper sense of self and our place in the universe. Silence is not an absence but a presence.

Like too many of us, I mistook a busy life for a rich one.

How often do we offer advice when what is really required is a compassionate ear?

Silence, along with the attention it fosters, is our anchor to the present, to the here and now.

Silence is not an absence but a presence. Not an emptiness but repletion. A filling up.

It is not the burdens and resentments we pick up that keep us derailed, but our continuing to tote them.

I couldn't understand the mindless acceptance of dogma, an acceptance people were quick to call faith.

How would the world change, Father Gervase wondered, if one could look for and see goodness, whatever human guise it was cloaked in, if one could see that potential in everyone and acknowledge not only the piousness of the saints but the complications of their past, the potential in sinners before they became saints.

That was the cruelty of memory. The way it could ambush you. Take you out at the knees.

What are you afraid of? The more I struggled and resisted, the stronger the ghost echoes grew and the more a possibility took shape in my mind just as the patio took shape beneath my hands. The saints were ordinary people. You do paint saints. Wherever I went these words of Father Gervase's stayed with me, a ghost staking out territory in my head as certainly as I had staked out the space for the bricks I now

But if one says: I cannot come because it is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice.

That was the cruelty of memory. The way it could ambush you.

Are these words true? At the second: Are they necessary? At the third: Are they kind?

In the field of memory, land mines were buried everywhere, easily tripped.

I wondered if in even the strongest of marriages there always existed a fault line and it just took one major, earth-shattering disaster to reveal it.

Or reading poetry. Now there was a job that should exist. To spend one's days in the company of Blake and Dickinson, Yeats and Hopkins, Auden and Milton. To fill one's mind with their wisdom, the music of their words. Today

Feelings aren't right or wrong. They just are.

Once I would not have believed this, but now I understand too well that there is in all of us, even the most pacific and composed, an enormous capacity for rage, asleep maybe but present nonetheless, waiting for the single thing that will uncage it. A

Our spiritual journey is—or ought to be—a deepening realization of the possibility of sainthood in all of us.

The cure for everything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.

But of course if we knew what awaited—the losses and disappointments and grief that are inevitable, the unthinkable things we will prove capable of—the knowledge would paralyze us. The

Every day is ordinary. Until it isn't. On this early-October morning, the townspeople in Port Fortune wake before dawn to an ordinary day with its ordinary sounds: the groaning of