To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.
No lower can a man descend than to interpret his dreams into gold and silver.
If you feel uncomfortable on stage, you can very easily descend into a sort of abyss, convinced you're the worst actor ever, that you're a disgrace to the profession, that you're a disgrace to yourself. It's an awful feeling.
Grace is always present. You imagine it as something high in the sky, far away, something that has to descend. It is really inside you, in your heart. When the mind rests in its source, grace rushes forth, sprouting as from a spring within you.
All writers must go from now to once a upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.
The victory of socialism will not descend like fate from heaven.
Individually the disciple and friend of Jesus who has learned to work shoulder to shoulder with his or her Lord stands in this world as a point of contact between heaven and earth, a kind of Jacob’s ladder by which the angels of God may ascend from and descend into human life. Thus the disciple stands as an envoy or a receiver by which the kingdom of God is conveyed into every quarter of human affairs.
To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.
There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
It is a lively spark of nobleness to descend in most favour to one when he is lowest in affliction
A nickname a man may chance to wear out; but a system of calumnity, pursued by a faction, may descend even to posterity. This principal has taken full effect on this state favorite.
It's a risky thing to pray and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God. . . . The fact is, though, that if you descend into the depths of your own spirit and arrive somewhere near the center of what you are, you are confronted with the inescapable truth that, at the very root of your existence, you are in constant and immediate contact with the infinite power of God.
So it follows that those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. [. . . ] human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.
There is so much each one of us can do to make a difference. We are at a dangerous juncture in the history of mankind. . . . We need to defend our principles and values, human rights, civil liberties and the rule of international law. If we don't our world will further descend into a state of chaos.
Before we put an American in harm's way, tell us why. No one wants to see the region descend into further chaos. There's a lot of concern about getting embroiled in another Vietnam and. . . about sending American troops once again to fight someone else's war.
I found that I could not climb my way up to God in a blaze of doing and performing. Rather, I had to descend into the depths of myself and find God there in the darkness of troubled waters.
Without U. S. troops, Afghanistan, like Iraq, could descend into chaos.
Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy?
