Quotes About Reflection

It has come quickly, this crushing, industrial love of paradise. The pervert-free, less-trammeled, hundred-mile-view days were little more than two decades past, not so very long ago. Yet already my own history sounds like another country.

There is no egg in egg plant, neither apple nor pine in pineapple. A guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? If teachers taught, why haven't preachers praught? We have noses that run and feet that smell. How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

If you're treading quicksand in the swamp of what-might- have-been, you can be sure that's the message your child gets. You're a rare person if being constantly reminded of your shortcomings spurs you to improve. For the rest of us, it's a self-esteem squasher. Time to grab for that overhead vine and realize that only a pencil dot separates "bitter" and "better.

I can write about images from my own childhood for children today. I wasn't sure I could do this, but there was no way out; I had to use the images from my own childhood, because the child I was is the only child I really know.

But now what? Is this a ticket to a new understanding of my life, or a bomb that's going to blow up everything? Consider one more possibility: that you remain essentially the same person you were, neither new nor destroyed.

I've managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility.

Humility is perfect quietness of heart. It is to expect nothing, to

When the words dance privately for you, it is possible to feel not alone.

Environmental history is, among other things, a lengthy account of human beings over and over imagining their way into a serious pickle.

When I want to hear my echo," said Brother Cadfael, "I will at least speak first.

Say your prayers, think quietly what you should do, do it, and sleep. There is no man living, neither king nor emperor, can do more or better, or trust in a better harvest.

It is a time for quietness and prayer. Death is present with us every day of our lives, it behooves us to take note of its nearness, not as a threat, but as our common experience on the way to grace. There is no more to be said. It is better to accept the will of God, and be silent.

He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands

Here I begin to know that blessedness is what can be snatched out the passing day and put away to think of afterwards.

Questions are as supple as willow wands, it's easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it.

But there are some born to do penance by nature. Maybe they lift the load for some of us who take it quite comfortably that we're humankind, and not angels.

But there comes a time when the old grow very tired, and the load of leadership unjustly heavy to bear. And perhaps—perhaps!—Heribert would not be quite so sad as even he now supposed, if the load should be lifted from him.

Beware how you pass judgment on your superiors," he said mildly, "at least until you know how to put yourself in their place and see from their view.

He goes back to his childhood, as old men do.

The river was gilded in every ripple with capricious, scintillating light.

Even a saint may take pleasure, in retrospect, in having been once desired

Great darkness and constant, feeble light, the slow flowing of time from far beyond his conception to far beyond his power to follow, the solitude about him and the troubled and peopled world within, all these settled into their perpetual pattern, a steady rhythm as perfect as sleep.

His chief uneasiness was that he could not be truly penitent about it.

I can't forget things that way. There's only one thing for it, and that's to admit everything and accept everything, and find some way of living that doesn't mean always sitting on top of a chest of grudges, trying to keep the lid from opening.