Quotes About Paradox

The world has an awful beauty. This is a chaotic place, humanity is a chaotic place, and I am a chaotic place.

What a paradox: that we connect with God, with divinity, in our flesh and blood and time and space. We connect with God in our humanity. A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that "hope inspires the good to reveal itself." This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.

Jesus was a rabbi, schooled by rabbis, who thought like rabbis. Rabbis, upon being asked a question by a disciple, usually answer with a paradoxical inquiry or a story. This can be annoying and time-consuming for those of us looking for neat, simple answers. But truth is too wild and complex to be contained in one answer, so Jesus often responded with a question or a parable.

Tom said either you learn to live with paradox and ambiguity or you'll be 6 years old for the rest of your life.

Topsy-turvy is often a symptom for the presence of God--the last become first, the hungry are fed, the obnoxious are welcomed.

If Man was the highest achievement of Nature's grand design, then Nature had a sense of humor. Whereas

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

That is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy us? Yet we can love each other.

What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not.

I think to be this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn.

I don't know how to be bad at being bad.

Is that the proof, Almighty God, that you are not there, that your saints could be such petty demons?

And what is an angel but a ghost in drag? STAN RICE from "Of Heaven" Body of Work (1983)

And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge.

Yes, I said softly to him, 'that is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we knows each other, could do anything but destroy us? Yet we can love each other.

Sí - le dije en voz baja -, este es el máximo mal: que hasta podemos llegar tan lejos como amarnos, tú y yo ¿Quién más nos podría mostrar una partícula de amor, una pizca de compasión o misericordia?¿Quién más, conociéndonos como nosotros nos conocemos, podría hacer algo más que destruirnos? Y, sin embargo, nos podemos amar.

beauty meant nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the despair finally, because the despair wasn't beautiful, and beauty then was a horrid irony?

It was what Trinity was all about: training you to be British and then insisting instead that you be Southern.

The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.

But Willa knew what she meant. She had felt that way during her own childhood; she'd felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl's body. And yet nowadays, paradoxically, it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about eleven years old was still gazing out at the world.

He was like anybody else, Red said. Insufferable and likable. Bad and good.

I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence...

That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very comprising terms that are the only ones that being offers.