A Great voice has fallen silent. A great heart has stopped.
Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are 1) where it comes from, and 2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute.
Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.
He [Christ] even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him - a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail.
I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.
I prefer the things around town. I'm not one for going out of town too much.
The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde.
Everywhere is here and every when is now.
A lot of times, kids go to college and take a major because they do what they think they're supposed to do. I told them I believe 90 percent of America gets up in the morning and drives to a job they hate. That could have happened to me in the hotel industry.