But I had read all of [the Bible] by then, and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?

You must not let your hope turn into expectation.

For a long time then I seemed to live by the slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life.

The question stands and waits, to be asked and asked, never finally to be answered, which he believes affirms a kind of faith. The world is fitted together, is held in its place in the great sky, has held together so far, through the worst of human damage so far, and by no human's power to save or make or know. That he can sometimes fit a mere poem's parts together is his fallback position, a sign of his limits, his formal ignorance, his faith in the great coherence.

Invariably the failure of organized religions, by which they cut themselves off from mystery and therefore from sanctity, lies in the attempt to impose an absolute division between faith and doubt, to make belief perform as knowledge; when they forbid their prophets to go into the wilderness, they lose the possibility of renewal.

I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, "Good-good-good-good-good!" like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith.

of all bad motives none may be worse or more hopeless than fear. Nobody, I think, has ever done good work because of fear. Good work is done by knowing how and by love. Love requires faith, courage, patience, and steadiness, none of which can come from fear.

I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

The] Christ story is one of the best stories that man has invented. . . . Faulkner in the University, 117

You cannot swim for new horizons unless you have courage to lose sight of the shore.