Coming to the Bible through commentaries is much like looking at a landscape through garret windows, over which generations of unmolested spiders have spun their webs.
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.
God really does take our work seriously: It is wrong, it is a sin, to accept or remain in a position that you know is a mismatch for you. Perhaps that's a form of sin you've never considered - the sin of staying in the wrong job. But God did not place you on the earth to waste away your years in labor that does not employ his design or purpose for your life, no matter how much you may be getting paid for it.
Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.
What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.
Retirement without literary amusements is death itself, and a living tomb.
I don't really think that there is anyone in the modern pop business who I feel I want to spar with.
When you're passionate about something, you want it to be all it can be. But in the endgame of life, I fundamentally believe the key to happiness is letting go of that idea of perfection.
I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.