Recently added

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.

Experience had taught them that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness.

I meant to leave you a reasonably candid testament to my better self, and it seems to me now that what you must see here is just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he's struggling with.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike.

A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

Her family was slower to forgive a failure of discretion than they were to forgive most things actually prohibited in Scripture.

Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Many people find it hard to go to church if they've been away for a while. I've seen it very often. And I'd say to them, It's because it means something to you. As it should be! So, you see, there's no reason at all to be disappointed. I used to say, The Sabbath is faithful. In a week she'll be here again.

As a matter of courtesy they treated one another's deceptions like truth, which was a different thing from deceiving or being deceived. In fact, it was a great part of the fabric of mutual understanding that made their family close.

He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I'm afraid theology would fail me.