I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance — that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are.

This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. That war is our wilderness.

What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it?

Behind the walls of his isolation, his intelligence and his will, unimpaired, and not hampered in any essential way by the partial obstruction of some of his senses, were turned to God, and communed with God Who was with him and in him, and Who gave him, as I believe, light to understand and to make use of his suffering for his own good, and to perfect his soul.

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.

For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we're a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered.

There are times, beloved, when God will place you in the middle of trials—a hospital stay, rejection, a financial blow. He lets you hurt as others hurt, knowing that the way you handle it will be a testimony, that your response will show others that there's something awesomely different about you.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

She regretted nothing she had shared with her lover, nor was she ashamed of the fires that had changed her life; just the opposite, she felt that they had tempered her, made her strong, given her pride in making decisions and paying the consequences for them.