"We're not trying to play God. We're trying to play human."
May 1953, Boston, MA
"Christ’s death was not a ransom, or a penal substitution, or a penal example; it was a revelation of the sacrificial love of God intended to awaken an answering love in the human heart."
“All I maintain is that there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with pestilences.”
"Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly 'inferior' capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity."
"Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects that must be saved from a burning building."
“The opposite of poverty isn't property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community ... So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own hands, and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us.”
"We can patiently accept not being good. What we cannot bear is not being considered good, not appearing good."
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."
Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, 78. (1926)
"The church does not seem to realize how unethical a conventionally respectable life may be."
“Many times trauma in a person decontextualized over time can look like personality. Trauma in a family decontextualized over time can look like family traits, trauma decontextualized in a people over time can look like culture and it takes time to slow it down so you can begin to discern what’s what.”
"I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so."
“In the face of the oppressed I recognize my own face, and in the hands of the oppressors I recognize my own hands.”
Thoughts in Solitude
"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going,
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."
Quoted in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
“People who think nonviolence is easy don’t realize that it’s a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth, and purging of the self so that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one’s own welfare.”
Remember your gratitude
even when the beasts are at the door.
Do not hold it hostage to your happiness.
It is embedded in your heart.
Let it out,
Even while you're weeping.
War Talk
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
The Ink Dark Moon (Vintage Books, 1990)
"Although the wind
blows terribly here
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house."
(translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani)
Unnamable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes
"History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations."
"The Parable of Perfect Silence", Poetry (December 2018)
"The love of God is not a thing one comprehends
but that by which — and only by which — one is comprehended."
Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power - And How They Can Be Restored
“So, is there an afterlife, and if so, what will it be like? I don't have a clue. But I am confident that the one who has buoyed us up in life will also buoy us up through death. We die into God. What more that means, I do not know. But that is all I need to know.”
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
"People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within."