Hope is optimism with a broken heart.
“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
"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)
"For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle we really get."
"This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time."