Quotes About Grace

God lends me His heart to love you with. I asked for it when I found my own was too small, and it really holds you, and leaves you room to grow.

The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body's tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.

I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us...

But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.

We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.

Therefore, dark past, I'm about to do it. I'm about to forgive you for everything.

Everything that was broken has forgotten its brokenness. I live now in a sky-house, through every window the sun. Also your presence. Our touching, our stories. Earthy and holy both. How can this be, but it is. Every day has something in it whose name is Forever.

The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever from, One or Two Things

Oh Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing towards you.

A poem should always have birds in it.

When I woke the morning light was just slipping in front of the stars and I was covered with blossoms.

Then I remember: death comes before the rolling away of the stone.

All I know is that thank you should appear somewhere. So just in case I can't find the perfect place- Thank you, thank you.

I know someone who kisses the way a flower opens, but more rapidly. Flowers are sweet. They have short, beatific lives. They offer much pleasure. There is nothing in the world that can be said against them. Sad, isn't it, that all they can kiss is the air. Yes, yes! We are the lucky ones.

But all my life—so far— I have loved best how the flowers rise and open, how the pink lungs of their bodies enter the fire of the world and stand there shining and willing—the one thing they can do before they shuffle forward into the floor of darkness, they become the trees.

God, rest in my heart and fortify me, take away my hunger for answers

Let the world have its way with you, luminous as it is with mystery and pain— graced as it is with the ordinary.

the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.

It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one's time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively.

I have been thinking about living like the lilies that blow in the fields. They rise and fall in the wedge of the wind, and have no shelter from the tongues of the cattle, and have no closets or cupboards, and have no legs. Still I would like to be as wonderful as that old idea. But if I were a lily I think I would wait all day for the green face of the hummingbird to touch me. What I mean is, could I forget myself even in those feathery fields?

When I have to die, I would like to die on a day of rain— long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.

For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poe's narrators—beating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace) we come to accept life's brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of us—the part of us that adores another person—ah! That is another matter.

And maybe there will be, after all, some slack and perfectly balanced blind and rough peace, finally, in the deep and green and utterly motionless pools after all that falling?