ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX
“If you are willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.”
“The writer’s job is the job of a clown, the clown who also talks about sorrow.”
“Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.”
“We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.”
“I think all teddy bears should have knitted suits.”
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”
“Life is moe fantastic than any fiction.”
“I don’t work. I only know how to have fun every day…. It’s as true now as it ever was: He who seeks beauty will find it!”
“The self-centered life has no place in the world of the deported. You must go beyond it, lay hold on something outside yourself.”
“I like a look of Agony/Because I know it’s true”
“I’ve had all my life a tremendously strong sense that indeed there is a hereafter, and that the transformation of the spirit is a phenomenon which one must reckon and in light of which one must attempt to live one’s life.”
Sviatoslav Richter said of her: “One day she developed a crush on someone who didn’t return her advances. One can understand why; he must have been terrified of her. And so she challenged him to a duel.”
“I came to literature through worship.”
“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
“I have an almost ideological esthetic preference for nonprofessional actors who themselves are shreds of reality as is a landscape, a sky, the sun, a donkey passing along the road.”
“There is a magic formula for resolving conflicts. It is this: Have as your objective the resolving of the conflict, not the gaining of advantage.”
“I had it in my mind to do something big—and I did.”
“Soon, soon, between one instant and the next, you will be well.”
From “Nude with Handgun and Rosary.”
“I prepare myself for rehearsals like I would for a marriage.”
“Take a close and very long look into the eyes of a chicken…It’s the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world.”
“The perfection of God is cast in a material which men almost despise, which they don’t consider worth searching for because of its simplicity, its lack of interest, because it is common to all men.”
THE HOMER OF THE INSECT WORLD
“After eighty-seven years of thought and observation, I say not merely that I believe in God—I can even say that I see him.”
“It was vicarious traveling for me to a made-up world that I liked better than the one I was in…No catastrophes occur. There are no generals or battles or warplanes on my stamps….Sometimes I get so concentrated in these worlds I get confused. …It’s hard to get out.”
“Every man’s life is a fairy tale written by God’s fingers.”
“Eddie didn’t take off where everyone else took off. He took off deeper.”
–Eddie’s brother Clyde
“Society laughs at old people’s dreams. They even laugh at dreams…until they come true.”
“The best thing someone can say to me is that while watching my performance they began to cry.”
“There’s nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.”
“I feel that what people call by the word ‘scavenger’ is really a resurrection.”
“During one period of chronic depression, it was impossible for me to live without a plastic lobster that I took with me everywhere.”
“It’s that little glint, that privileged look into a keyhole, and realizing suddenly that there’s this little universe that’s probably suffering and barely breathing, but it’s pulsating, vibrating, with its own life. That in itself is a metaphor of the universe.”
Jesus statue found in Elvis’s bedroom at Graceland.
Photo by H. King
“Bluegrass has brought more people together and made more friends than any music in the world.”
“We’ll make it not because we’re a better people–but because we’re a weaker people.”
“BY THE WAY, IF ANYONE HERE IS IN ADVERTISING OR MARKETING–KILL YOURSELF. THANK YOU.”