Quotes from Ray Blackston

There are potholes on the road less traveled. Some deep, some not so deep, some you dig yourself. Most are filled with mud. Many contain rocks. Once in a while, however, you'll be walking along and step in one a bit more accommodating... shabby, green, and pulsing with life. It'll tickle your feet, like clover.

May God grant us the grace to laugh at ourselves.

We spend vast amounts of time and energy crafting a thesis in our heads of how life should play out. Then Almighty God spends an incredibly brief amount of time blowing our thesis to bits.

We passed Columbia, the state furnace, inhaling hot garnet air as if straight from Aunt Bea's oven.

If you asked Neil today, he would tell you his furlough was in 3-D: dates, delirium, and disaster. I provided the dates, the Greenville girls provided the delirium, and Allie, well, she provided the disaster.

Singleness can be a wonderful furnace.

Richmond was my birthplace, but it was merely my launching pad, no home.

Between high dunes and low dunes and sea oats she walked, a blonde nomad wandering among shorebirds.

Guys and their initiative - sometimes that too is like extracting meat from the armature of a crab.

Above the dunes of Pawleys Island a choir of sea oats bent westward, tickling the sunset and waving g'night.

As if it were a guest of honor bowing out prematurely, the sun sank wide-eyed and mischievous, to where staring was permissible and admiration was the only option, a pastel departure as wondrous and unique as fingerprint.

It's just that I'd rather get to know you before I get to know your lips.

Thanks for respecting me.

I listened again for a voice. But there was no voice tonight, just my obedience. No professional carpenters, just willing bodies. No last-minute detours off the interstate, just eight seats reserved in economy class.

The plane had seating for twelve, legroom for five, and all the turbulence of Darcy's family life.

Rich wisdom is better even than rich soil, young Neil. Jose sees now that you grow in wisdom like a weed in manure.

He mounted the board in roughly the same manner as a walrus wound mount a balance beam.

Briefly, I tried to imitate her. But, I had only the form, not the substance.

Against a blue sky the tangelo rose swiftly, first opposing gravity, then submitting, caught in the velocity like a ripe comet streaking towards the bonds of matrimony. In its arc flew the virtues of commitment and loyalty and passion, followed by the afterburners of summer — amorous and ablaze. Faster the tangelo descended, an orange blur; poetic, expensive, at once brunette and blonde, rotating so fast that its skin appeared tan, then pale, then something luminous, the color of love.

We're all gonna become overweight sponges if we just soak up spiritual data and never get out into the world to be squeezed.

The Lone Ranger is a pagan child. If I ever have kids, I'm home-schooling 'em.

Because outside of God's shadow I was just a gaudy plastic float filled with stubborn air, drifting off like a blind Jonah in search of Plan B, manipulating circumstances and wondering why I kept waking up in my very own Tarshish.

But in God's shadow I had been dazzled by the detour, amazed at the fraternity, and flabbergasted by the depth that comes from simplicity, from serving in a village that was shabby, green, and pulsing with life.

Tuesday evening while grilling chicken on