...the right of the individual to elect freely the manner of his care in illness must be preserved.

Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night. Order is only the possibility of rest.

As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

I don't remember when I did not know Port William, the town and the neighborhood. My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life. That story has surprised me almost every day—but now, in the year 1986, so near the end, it seems not surprising at all but only a little strange, as if it all has happened to somebody I don't yet quite know. Certainly, all of it has happened to somebody younger.

Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark.

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture—such as I was when I made my pond—is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

After you have said "thy will be done," what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray "thy will be done" after you see what it means?

The Wild Geese (excerpt) Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.

What he was now seeing was the street lonely, savage, and cool. That was it: cool; he was thinking, saying aloud to himself sometimes, "I better move. I better get away from here." But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora's a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else.