Quotes from K.J. Bishop

Somewhere there are gardens where peacocks sing like nightingales, somewhere there are caravans of separated lovers traveling to meet each other; there are ruby fires on distant mountains, and blue comets that come in spring like sapphires in the black sky. If this is not so, meet me in the shameful yard, and we will plant a gallows tree, and swing like sad pendulums, never once touching.

At that moment, he realised that he did not exist to her in the same way that he existed in his own perception. She held a copied version, an interpretation of him, filtered through the matrix of her priorities and desires. Therefore, surely, he only held a copy of her.

In the end, having no compass for his desires, he yielded to his nature.

I have come to believe that we steer our individual spheres of being through the spectra of possible worlds via the choices we make, the acts we perform. Most people stick to known routes, and therefore cannot travel far. They live too modestly, and perhaps too privately. Only by being strange can we move, for strange acts cause us to be rejected by whatever normality we have offended, and to be propelled towards a normality that can better accommodate us.

The goodness of the world grew like moss in cracks, she thought. It grew, somehow, with hidden roots, nourished by something unseen.

Tobacco Will Slowly and Surely Kill You." And so will time , Gwynn thought. But if you want the job done quickly, professionals recommend bullet.

The wisdom which is now conventional claims that light creates shadows. But the facts are otherwise. Darkness came first and is infinitely older and more enduring than light. Light borrows a little space; then it dies or moves on, and the dark exists again as if it had never been disturbed.

There were no milestones in the Copper Country. Often a traveler could only measure the progress of a journey by the time it took to get from each spoiled or broken thing to the next: a half-day's walk from a dry well to the muzzle of a cannon poking out of a sand-slope, two hours to reach the skeletons of a man and a mule. The land was losing its battle with time. Ancient and exhausted, it visited decrepitude on everything within its bounds, as though out of spleen.

How long before we devise a means of telling horoscopes with gas lamps?

You're doing it again. Using reason to argue faith. Can't be done. Like playing croquet with a crochet hook. Sounds something like the right tool for the job, but isn't.

Evil flourishes because the good aren't good enough," see murmured. "And sometimes the good just have bad days.

Time steals from us the capacity to be smitten, does it not? It slowly but surely washes away all your enthusiasm and deposits uncertainty in its place.

My soul longs for God, but a man is not just his soul, is he? Terrible to say, my clay lusts after the clay of nubile girl. To soothe my guilt, and please forgive my indelicacy, I have convinced myself that I seek to find God again in their arms and their unmentionable places.

He had acquired a reputation for possessing a noble character, and even for being something of a hero - or, at least, in the assessment of one contemporary commentator, one of those parties who are able to fulfil the public need in the event of genuine heroes being absent or, for any reason, unpalatable.

Think of a potter taking a misshapen bowl from his wheel and pounding it back into the tub of clay. A soul suffers while it is being pounded in this way, and suffers until it ceases to be. You are pounded down, and that which was you gets into something else. God tries again, and tries until the Work is complete. Meanwhile you, my son, are long gone

You see yourself as something of a champion of the poor, don't you?" "No, just their doctor.

It occurs to me that my thinking has been faulty: we do not feel God's absence. We feel the absence of all that is lost to God, that which has set itself apart and refuses to return, believing itself to be in exile.

Your people are not unwise, after all: love of the perfect Deity may prevent us from loving imperfect man! But God's will is to restore the lost; and that can't be done without loving them.

Albo niczego nie mo?na wybaczy?, albo nie ma nic do wybaczania.

She replied that the manual labour exercised her body while allowing her mind and spirit to rest, adding that she believed there was value in the discipline of ordinariness, provided that it was only a discipline and not an unvarying state of being.

It's the world! What can you do?