"I give you my blessing for a great obedience in the world. You still have much journeying before you. And you will have to marry--yes, you will. You will have to endure everything before you come back again. And there will be much world to do. But I have no doubt of you, that is why I am sending you. Christ is with you. Keep him, and he will keep you. You will behold great sorrow, and in this sorrow you will be happy. Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly. Remember my words from now on, for although I shall still talk with you, not only my days but even my hours are numbered." (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)
"But I do detect in the quotidian, meaning daily or ordinary, rhythms of writing a stage that might be described as parturient, or in labor, about to produce or come forth with an idea or discovery. And it always seems that just when daily life seems most unbearable, stretching out before me like a prison sentence, when I seem most dead inside, reduced to mindlessness, bitter tears or both, that what is inmost breaks forth, and I realize that what had seemed 'dead time' was actually a period of gestation." (Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women's Work)
"The discourse that is God became not merely body but flesh, as if to emphasize the materiality of God enfleshed. The implications for the production of text unfolded in the course of early Christian literature. Authorship could perform the incarnation of discourse. Writing became a vessel for holiness. Meanwhile holy men and women made Christ legible in their bodies--made their bodies text. Implications for the performance of authorship differentiated Christian from non-Christian literary effort." (Derek Krueger, Derek. Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East)
"The model for subverting the body/spirit opposition is in the sanctification of matter itself. This is the difference incarnation makes, not only for its explicit revaluing of the body but also for framing the subsequent production of the logos....writing is no longer debased: it is a licensed, saintly mode, an imitation of God." (Derek Krueger, Derek. Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East)
"To think through things, that is the still life painter's work--and the poet.Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations." (Mark Doty. Still Life with Oysters and Lemons)
"The important event in the distance has vanished; the important event is here, now. Daily blessing. Plain abundance." (Mark Doty. Still Life with Oysters and Lemons)
"I have felt the energy and life of the painting's will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world." (Mark Doty. Still Life with Oysters and Lemons)
"If you tell your story with sufficient candor and concreteness, it will be an interesting story and in some sense a universal story. I do it also in the hope of encouraging others to do the same--at least to look back over their own lives, as I have looked back over mine, for certain themes and patterns and signals that are so easy to miss when you're caught up in the process of living them." (Frederick Buechner, Now and Then)
"How much do you put into an account like this? What do you put in? How differently your life sounds, feels, tastes, when you are living it from the way it sounds when you write it down with all the day-to-dayness of it forgotten or left out. On paper it sounds as if you knew where you were going and why you were going there and kept at it. It sounds as if you had a plan in mind and that one move followed another move more or less in order. It sounds as if your days were all of a piece and made sense." (Frederick Buechner, Now and Then)
"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace." (Frederick Buechner, Now and Then)
