There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us."

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 245)

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 243)

Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 209)

"There is that scattereth, and increaseth yet more, and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth only to want."

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 198)

"For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?" In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a serparate language in each of us, also a serparate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. 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 an what is acceptable--which I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

The thoughtlessness of any individual, when it is seen to be in service to the mindfulness of the Lord, cannot justify anger.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 194)

There are two insidious nothions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world. (No doubt ther eare more than two, but the others will have to wait.) One is that religion and religious experience are illusions of some sort (Feuerbach, Freud, etc.), and the other is that religion itself is real, but your belief that you participate in it is an illusion. I think the second of these is the more insidious, because it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 145)

How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself to be? The prophets love the people they chastise, a thing this writer does not appear to me to do.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 142)

I heard a man say once that Christians worship sorrow. That is by no means true. But we do believe there is a sacred mystery in it, it's fair to say that...I believe there is a dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low. This does not meant hat it is ever right to cause suffering or to seek it out when it can be avoided, and serves no good, practicle purpose. To value suffering in itself can be dangerous and strange, so I want to be very clear about this. It means simply that God takes the side of sufferers against thos who afflict them.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 137)

When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?...each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists ofour behavior, and the reaction of God to usm ight be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgemental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? Which how much assurance do we perform it?

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 124)

That is how life goes--we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wildnerness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's. I need to bear this in mind.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 119)

I have always liked the phrase "nursing a grudge," because many people are tender of hteir resentments, as of the thing nearest their hearts.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 117)

The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it is not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe...It all means more than I can tell you, so you must not judge what I know by what I find words for....I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 114)

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean the most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 102)

I know you will be and I hope you are an excellent man, and I will love you absolutely if you are not.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 73)

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I'm glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize ther eis nothing more astonishing than a human face...It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. 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. But his is the truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 66)

One lapse of judgement can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 60)

As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial...and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting hte pavement so hard they'd fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such enegy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 56-57)

A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought--the self that yeilds the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 45)

It seemes to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so."

...Then just six months later I baptized her. And I felt like asking her, "What have I done? What does it mean?" That was a question that came to me often, not because I felt less than certain I had done something that did mean something, but because no matter how much I thought and read and prayed, I felt outside the mystery of it.

Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while i had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I'd have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, "look at the moon." and he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for a quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn't get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn't given much thought to the nature of the horizon.

My father said, "I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I'm glad to know that."

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 14-15)

Well, see and see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand, as the Lord says. I can't claim to understand that saying, as many times as I've heard it, and even preached on it. It simply states a deeply mysterious fact. You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 7)

A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine. Above all, mind what you say. "Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire." --that's the truth.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 6)

It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 5)

What are we to do then about what seem increasing divisions in the church centered around the efforts of some Mormons to join in the multicultural and feminist revolution? One frequent response is to quote Christ's command, "I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye ar not mine" (D&C 38:27), as a way of condemning those whose otherness and interest in diversity seem to bring division. I don't believe, however, that Christ means "Be all alike in the Church or I will not accept you," but rather "Be like me by accepting each other in the Church, even if you're not all alike." He is asking us to be one in our acceptace of diversity, not as a denial of diversity.

As evidence for this crucial interpretation, I offer the following: Just before making that command, Christ pleads, "Let every man esteem his brother as himself." He then retells a story of a man who has twelve sons and who claims to be no respecter of persons, a just man, but nevertheless, "saith unto the one son: Be thou clothed in robes and sit thou here; and to the other: Be thou clothed in rags and sit thou there (D&C38:25-26)...Finally, Christ concludes, "This I have given unto you as a parable, and it is even as I am. I say unto you be one." Clearly, to be like Christ rather than the man in the parable, we need to learn to love unconditionally and treat equally all the members of our church and human families, no matter how different they are.

-Eugene England, Making Peace (pg. 190-191).

"There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto."

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (pg. 41)

"They were in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all. Each foreseeing anight of drink, perhaps of love. How many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such plans."

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (pg. 38)

The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didn't make it to suit everybody, did he?

I don't believe he much had me in mind.

Aye, said the old man. but where does a man come by his notions. what world's he seen that he liked better?

I can think of better places and better ways.

Can ye make it be?

No.

No. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don't want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.  It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it.  You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that?

I don't know.

Believe it.

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (pg. 19)

"I know that small acts of valor may be all that is visible of great movement of courage within. For we are all the elect, each one of us, and we are embarked upon a journey to something unimaginable. We do not know what will be required of us, and we have nothing to sustain us but the counsel of our fathers."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 132)

"You said there were some things you couldn't deserve. Things so sweet or so precious or even just so common to all humanity that there was no deserving them they just were given and you couldnt question them whether they fell to you or to someone else you couldnt question them. Maybe that dead boy doesn't deserve to be buried with his family. But Ben does he have to? Does he have to?"

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 126)

"Where are the others? Where are the others. Oh I've had time in great abundance to reflect upon that terrible question. Because we cannot save ourselves unless we save all ourselves."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 113)

"Well, it wasn't the good Lord's plan that I ever heard of for men to be gone all hours of the day and night."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 45)

"I know nothing of God. But I know that something knows. Something knows or else that old man could not know. Something knows and will tell you. It will tell you when you stop pretending that you know."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 97)

"My experience is limited....I am no longer reduced by these mysteries but rather am one more among them."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 97)

"I know that evil exists. I think it is not selective but only opportunistic."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 97)

"Nothing is ever finally arrived at. The journeyman becomes a master when he masters the journeyman's trade. He becomes a master when he ceases to wish to be one."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 96)

"I'd pretend ignorance to get you to stay. If I thought you could be fooled. But only people with wants can be fooled and you have none."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 95)

"Trouble comes to a house it comes to visit everbody."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 71)

"The reason the stonemason's trade remains esoteric above all others is that the foundation and the hearth are the soul of human society and it is that soul that the false mason threatens."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 66)

"I'd read a great deal in the Old Testament before it occurred to me that it as among other things a handbook for revolutionaries. that what it extolls above all else is freedom. There is not historian and no archaelogist who has any conception of what stonework means. The Semitic god was a god of the common man and that is why he'll have no hewn stones to his altar. He'll have no hewing of stone because he'll have no slavery."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 65)

"All trades have their origin in the domestic and their corruption in the state."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 65)

"All honors are empty and none more than honorary masonry. Because there is nothing that will separate from the work itself. The work is everything, and whatever is learned is learned in the doing...And if it is true that laying stone can teach you reverence of God and tolerance of your neighbor and love for your family it is also true that this knowledge is instilled in you through the work and not through any contemplation of the work."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pgs. 64-65)

"I seen they was some things that folks couldnt lie about. The facts was too plain. And what a man was worth at his work was one of them things. It was just knowed to everbody from the lowest to the highest and they wasnt no several opinions about it."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 49)

"Stone aint so heavy as the wrath of a fool."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 48)

"Thinking's rare among all classes. But a laborer who thinks, well, his thought seems more likely to be tempered with humanity. He's more inclined to tolerance. He knows that what is valuable in life is life."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 38)

The rain falls upon the just
And also on the unjust fellas
But mostly it falls upon the just
Cause the unjust have the just's umbrellas

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 38)

"The arc of the moral universe is indeed long but it does bend toward justice."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 32)

"The man's labor that did the work is in the work. You caint make it go away. Even if it's paid for it's still there. If ownership lies in the benefit to a man then the mason owns all the work he does in this world and you caint put that claim aside nor qite it and it don't make no difference whose name is on the paper."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 30)

"They's lots of work in this world that aint never paid for. But the accounts gets balanced anyway. In the long run. A man that contracts for work and then dont pay for it, the world will reckon with him fore it's out. With the worker too. you live long enough and you'll se it. they's a ledger kept that hte pages dont never get old nor cumbly nor the ink dont never fade. If it don't balance then they aint no right in this world and if they aint then where did I hear of it at? Where did you? Only way it wont is if you start retribution on you own. You start retribution on you own you'll be on you own. That man up there aint goin to help you. Aint no use even to ask."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 29)

"The structure of the world is such as to favor the prosperity of men. without this belief nothing is possible. What we are at arms against are those philosophies that claim the fortuitous in mens' inventions. For we invent nothing but what god has put to hand."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 10)

"True masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 10)

"A man that will work they's always hope for him."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 27)

"It take a pretty sorry daddy to be worse than no daddy at all."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 27)

"He has thought deeply about his trade and in this he's much out of the ordinary."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 8)

"Anything excellent is always rare."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 8)

"To the repentant thief upon the cross, the soft Jesus of the modern Bible holds out hope of Heaven: 'Today thou art with me in Paradise.' But in older translations, as Soen Roshi points out, there is no 'today,' no suggestion of the future. In the Russian translation, for example, the meaning is 'right here now.' Thus, Jesus declares, 'You are in Paradise right now'--How much more vital! There is no hope anywhere but in this moment, in the karmic terms laid down by one's own life."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 310)

"Someone once said that God offers man the choice between repose and truth; he cannot have both."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 303)

"GS remarked that this was one of the best trips he had ever made, 'tough enough so that we feel we have really accomplished something, but not so tough that it wiped us out entirely.'"

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 259)

"The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 257)

"If the snow leopard should manifest itself, then I am ready to see the snow leopard. if not, then somehow (and I don't understand this instinct, even now) I am not ready to perceive it, in the same way that I am not ready to resolve my koan; and in the not-seeing, I am content. I think I must be disappointed, having come so far, and yet I do not feelt hat way. I am disappointed, and also, I am not disappointed. That the snow leopard is, that it is here, that its frosty eyes watch us from the mountain--that is enough."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg.249)

"In another life--this isn't what I know, but how I feel--these mountains [the Himalayas] were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one's own true nature is a kind of homegoing."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 239)

"Eternity is not remote, it is here beside us."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg.233)

"The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no 'meaning,' they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, thre is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 218)

"You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are evey one sole heirs as well as you."

-Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation

quoted in Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 217)

"One of the four cardinal sins in the monastic order of the Buddha--after unchastity, theft, and killing--was laying claim to miraculous powers. it is related that Kakyamuni once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had wasted twenty years of his human existence in learning how to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 158)

"Something is listening, and I listen, too: who is it that intrudes here? Who is breathing? i picka fern to see its spores, cast it away, and am filled in that instant with misgiving: the great sins, so the Sherpas say, are to pick wild flowers and to threaten children. My voice murmurs its regret, a strange sound that deepens the intrusion. I look about me--who is it that spoke? and who is listening? Who is this ever-present 'I' that is not me?"

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg.141)

"Fear comes when all the mysteries are laid open, when what we thought we wanted is attained. It is just at the moment of seeming fulfillment that we sense irrevocable betrayal, like a great wave rising silently behind us."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 138)

"Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western world by air pollution and the glare of artificial light; for my children's children, the power, peace, and healing of the night will be obliterated."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 126)

"The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of the duty (to that self which is inseperable from others) to live it through as bravely and as generously as possible."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg.118)

"The mountains had been a nural field of activity where, playing onthe frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as breath."

This same mountaineer [Maurice Herzog], after nearly losing his life, wrote of "freedom" in a quite different way:

"I saw that it was better to be true than to be strong...I was saved and I had won my freedom. This freedom, which I shall never lose...has given me the rare joy of loving that which I used to despise. A new and splendid life has opened out before me."

-Maurice Herzog, Annapurna (1953)

quoted in Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pgs. 117)

"The sense of having one's life needs at hand, of traveling light, brings with it intense energy and exhilaration. Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg.117)

"The Eye with which I see God is the Eye with which God sees me."

-Meister Eckhardt

Quoted in Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg.113)

"Meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this 'void,' this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies ultimate reality, and here one's own true nature is reborn, in a return from what Buddhists speak of as 'great death.'"

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg.94)

"This record of Adam and his posterity is the only scriptural account we have of the appearance of man upon the earth. But we have also a vast and ever-increasing volume of knowledge concerning man, his early habits and customs, his industries and works of art, his tools and implements, about which such scriptures as we have thus far received are entirely silent. Let us not try to wrest the scriptures in an attempt to explain away what we can not explain. The opening chapters of Genesis, and scriptures related thereto, were never intended as a text-book of geology, archaeology, earth-science or man-science. Holy Scripture will endure, while the conceptions of men change with new discoveries. We do not show reverence for the scriptures when we misapply them through faulty interpretation."

-James E. Talmage, The Earth and Man, Aug. 9, 1931

"The oldest, that is to say the earliest, rocks thus far identified in land masses reveal the fossilized remains of once living organisms, plant and animal. The coal strata, upon which the world of industry so largely depends, are essentially but highly compressed and chemically changed vegetable substance. The whole series of chalk deposits and many of our deep-sea limestones contain the skeletal remains of animals. These lived and died, age after age, while the earth was yet unfit for human habitation."

-James E. Talmage, The Earth and Man, Aug. 9, 1931

"The statement made by Elder Smith that the existence of pre-adamites is not a doctrine of the Church is true. It is just as true that the statement 'there were not pre-adamites on the earth' is not a doctrine of the church. Neither side of the controversy has been accepted as a doctrine at all."

-Heber J. Grant diary, 25 Jan. 1931, quoted in The Search for Harmony (pg. 97)

"The gospel embraces all truth. Brigham Young especially emphasized the propriety of seeking all truth. The assumption that because a man understands something about the operation of the Universe, he will necessarily be less faithful is a gratuitous assumption contradicted by numberless examples. God, who understands all about the Universe, is apparently, not troubled by this knowledge. Some people drift when they study, but some people drift when they don't study. If the Church espouses the cause of ignorance, it will alienate more people than if it advises man to seek after truth, even at some risk."

-Henry Eyring, letter to N. Eldon Tanner, 19 Oct. 1967, quoted in The Search for Harmony (pg. 153)

"The evidence seems to me to point toward an age of the earth between 4 or 5 billion years and to the existence of pre-Adamic man. I don't think that it is reasonable to explain the observed geologic formations on the theory that they were moved from some other worlds. I have no difficulty reconciling myself to the idea of life before Adam and to a great age of the earth. Our scriptural accounts are brief and don't seem to me to rule out these possibilities. The scriptural emphasis is on God's dealings with Adam and his descendants and the treatment of pre-Adamic history is sketchy, no doubt for a good reason. It seems, to me, clear that the Lord used the Prophet Joseph to restore His gospel. This is the important thing to me. Just how he runs the world, I'm obliged to leave up to Him. All I can do is find out how he does it by every means available."

-Henry Eyring, letter to Rosemary Klutch, 27 Jan. 1971, quoted in The Search For Harmony (pg. 152).

"To live with a saint is not difficult, for a saint makes no comparisons, but saintlike aspiration presents problems."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg.79)

"Whether joyful or dark, the drug vision can be astonishing, but eventually this vision will repeat itself, until even the magic show grows boring...Drugs can clear away the past, enhance the present; toward the inner garden, they can only point the way. Lacking the temper of ascetic discipline, the drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life. Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the 'I' from true experience of the One."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 48)

"The one danger of the mystical search: there is no way back without doing oneself harm. Many paths appear, but once the way is taken, it must be followed to the end."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 46)

The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing...He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths...There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus, or, "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid."...He is at once set apart and isolated,a s he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law...The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization--absolute and unconditional--of its own particular law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being...he has failed to realize his life's meaning.

Carl Jung, Collected Works (Chapter 7)

Quoted by Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 33)

"One night in 1945, on a Navy vessel in Pacific storm, my relief on bow watch, seasick, failed to appear, and I was alone for eight hours in a maelstrom of wind and water, noise and iron; again and again, waves crashed across the deck, until water, air, and iron became one. Overwhelmed, exhausted, all thought and emotion beaten out of me, I lost my sense of self, the heartbeat I heard was the heart of the world, I breathed with the mighty risings and declines of earth, and this evanescence seemed less frightening than exalting. Afterward, there was pain of loss--loss of what, I wondered, understanding nothing."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg.43)

"Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern."

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Quoted by Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 42)

"The Universe itself is the scripture of Zen, for which religion is no more and no less than the apprehension of the infinite in every moment."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 35)

"Hast thou attuned thy being to humanity's great pain, O Candidate for Light?"

-Mahayana texts (Tibetan)

Quoted in Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 34)

"Service is rendered for its own sake--it is the task, not the employer that is served."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 33)

"Sakyamuni [the Buddah] perceived that man's existence is inseperable from sorrow; that the cause of suffering is craving; that peace is attained by extinguishing craving; that this liberation may be brought about by following the Eight-fold Path: right attention to one's understanding, intentions, speech, and actions; right livelihood, effort, mindfulness; right concentration, by which is meant the unification of the self through sitting yoga."

Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 18)

"All other creatures look down toward the earth, but man was given a face so that he might turn his eyes toward the stars and his gaze upon the sky."

-OVID, Metamorphoses

"That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called 'visions,' the whole so-called 'spirit-world,' death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God."

-Rainer Maria Rilke

True happiness
Consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice.

-Ben Jonson

"When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course, the situation is too tough for him.

"In the same way the human begin struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it naturally misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one."

-Karl A. Menninger

"It was then that it came, though I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first. I knew there would be not other way to do it. No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 326)

"I hoped that the Ribbono Shel Olom would listen more seriously to my prayers for my parents and Jacob Kahn than he had to my father's prayers for me."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 268)

"An artist who deceives himself is a fraud and a whore. You [cut off your payos] because you were ashamed. You did that because wearing payos did not fit your idea as an artist. Asher Lev, an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist. It is of no importance to me whether you wear your payos behind your ears or whether you cut off your hair entirely and go around bald...Great artists will not give a damn about your payos; they will only give a damn about your art...You want to cutt off your payos, go ahead. But do not do it because you think it will make you more acceptable as an artist."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 257)

"I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I see them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they were not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world...One day you will understand about the truth of feelings."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 226)

"As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it...An artist is responsible to his art. Anything else is propaganda."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 218)

"You draw with too much love. No man can love as much as you and survive as an artist. You will become sentimental. And sentimentalism is death to art."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 215)

"No one will listen to what you have to say unless they are convinced you have mastered it. Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right no attempt to add to it or to rebel against it."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 213)

"Millions of people can draw. Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 212)

"A life should be lived for the sake of heaven. One man is not better than another because he is a doctor while the other is a shoemaker. One man is not better than another because he is a lawyer while the other is a painter. A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 192)

"All the Jewish people are one body and one soul...If one part of the body hurts, the entire body hurts--and the entire body must come to the help of the part that hurts."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 132)

"To touch a person's heart, you must see a person's face. One cannot reach a soul through a telephone."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 117)

"Someone once asked how it is possible to establish a connection between man and the Master of the Universe. The answer was that man must take the first step. In order for there to be a connection between man and the Master of the Universe, there must first be an opening, a passageway, even a passageway as small as the eye of a needle. but man must make the opening by himself; man must take the beginning step. Then the Master of the Universe will move in, as it were, and widen the passageway."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 110)

"A Jew should not only talk, he should also do."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 81)

"To kill a human being is to kill also the children and children's children that might have come from him down through all the generations."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 58)

"It is absurd to apologize for a mystery."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 3)

"A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 276)

"You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it...You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes--sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 262)

"A teacher can also sometimes not know."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 249)

"'Reuven, do you know what the rabbis tell us God said to Moses when he was about to die?'
I stared at him. 'No,' I heard myself say.
'He said to Moses, "You have toiled and labored, now you are worthy of rest."'"

---

Human beings do not live forever Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value there is to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?...I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so it's quality is immeasureable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 216-217)

"When I was ten or eleven years old, I complained to [my father] about something, and he told me to close my mouth and look into my soul. He told me to stop running to him every time I had a problem. I should look into my own soul for the answer."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 170)

"I read a psychology book last week in which the author said that the most mysterious thing in the universe is man himself. We're blind about the most important thing in our lives, our own selves."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 156)

"If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 149)

"You think a friend is an easy thing to be? If you are truly his friend, you will discover otherwise. You will see."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 144)

"Reuven, as you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them--'ordinary things' is a better expression. That is the way the world is."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 114)

"The Ba'al Shem Tov...taught them that the purpose of man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking, praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only beause we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly. Evil is like a hard shell. Within this shell is the spark of God, is goodness. How do we penetrate the shell? By sincere and honest prayer, by being happy and by loving all people...no man is so sinful that he cannot be purified by love and understanding."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 110)

"We are like other people, Reuven. We do not survive disaster merely by appealing to invisible powers. We are as easily degraded as any other people."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 107)

"Reuven, what could our people say to God during the Chmielnicki uprising? They could not thank Him for the slaughter goin on before their eyes, and they would not deny His existence... At the moment when there seems to be no meaning in life, at that moment a person must try to find new meaning."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 106)

"No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 78)

"When a person comes to talk to you, you should be patient and listen. Especially if he has hurt you in any way."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 68)