Quotes from Douglas Carlton Abrams

When you are grateful,' Brother Steindl-Rast explained, 'you are not fearful, and when you are not fearful, you are not violent. When you are grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not out of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people and respectful to all people. The grateful world is a world of joyful people. Grateful people are joyful people. A grateful world is a happy world.

A true lover must know how to receive as well as to give.

To give love to one who needs it is a far greater pleasure than to receive it.

Is it the beloved who evokes love, or the lover who has love to give?

I was attempting to do something I had never done before, and whenever we challenge ourselves, fear and doubt are inevitable. I am not sure we ever vanquish these voices. Whenever we are at the edge of our ability and experience, they always whisper in our ears, their worried words. I have come to see that these voices are actually trying to keep us safe as they warn us away from the unfamiliar and the unknown, but this does not make their daggers of self-doubt any less painful.

Scientists have long known that our brains have evolved with a negative bias. It was no doubt advantageous for our survival to focus on what was wrong or dangerous. Gratitude cuts across this default mode of the mind. It allows us to see what is good and right and not just what is bad and wrong.

There was more pleasure in one kiss from the man I loved than in thousand nights with a stranger.

My horse's back was wet with life, and I rejoiced in the beauty of every creature that groans and sweats.

The grateful world is a world of joyful people.

The heart is forever unfaithful, and the feelings of love will come and go, but true love is not about what you feel. It is about what you do.

Happy marriage is the greatest wealth a man can possess, and one that a peasant can have as easily as a king.

Having already worked in publishing for a number of years, I was not naive when I entered the submission fray. I knew I would have only one chance to submit my fiction to my agent, and that she would have only one chance to submit it to publishers. So I held on to it, revising and polishing obsessively over twenty-three drafts before I shared it with my agent.

I could not possibly love one woman, having known the holiness of all women.

A woman's passion is nothing less than the sea that tosses a man's ship, and to weather the storm he must use skill and humility to ride her waves, having given up his own course and dragged down his sails, letting the sea take him where it will. For a sailor who knows that there is nothing to fear, this is the greatest adventure of life, as he lashes himself to the mast, knowing that his surrender is his strength and the chance for his redemption.

Publishing your first fiction is somewhat like sailing during hurricane season.

Outer-body-experiences are hard to describe, since all we really know are our five senses. Suffice it to say that there was a tingling sensation and a sense of the laws of gravity loosening their grip on my body, much like being an astronaut floating above the surface of my house.

It is hard to convey the night-waking, body-trembling experience of putting a creation of one's soul out into the world for acceptance and rejection.

To make love to a fantasy was the second betrayal of a libertine.

I think it is essential to promote your work, since there are over 100,000 books published each year, and readers can fall in love with books they've never heard about.

"Happy marriage" is a contradiction in terms.

Dreams were not messengers from the spirit world. They were simply the detritus of the brain's random firings during REM sleep.

If we could live for a million years, then maybe it would be worthwhile to create some problems. But our life is short. Now you see, we are guests here on this planet, visitors who have come for a short time, so we need to use our days wisely, to make our world a little better for everyone.

To know a mature woman is to know more than her body. It is to know her dreams and her secrets. It is to know that a dance is a fight, and a fight is a dance, and that passion and compassion beat in the same breast.

In Heaven (if there is one), we are held accountable for every joy we failed to taste.