The author likens crisis, and particularly war, to stop motion photography in its capacity to make changes plain that are ordinarily too gradual to be seen.

Slowly it gets to be a waiting whose outward sense I cannot comprehend; the inward reason must be found daily. Both of us have lost infinitely much during the past months; time today is a costly commodity, for who knows how much more time is given to us.7 Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Maria von Wedemeyer, 20 September 1943

It is a strange fact that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they allow nothing to disturb them. They think they are doing God a service in this, but actually they are disdaining God's "crooked yet straight path" (Gottfried Arnold). They do not want a life that is crooked and balked.

Culturally it means a return from the newspaper and the radio to the book, from feverish activity to unhurried leisure, from dispersion to concentration, from sensationalism to reflection, from virtuosity to art, from snobbery to modesty, from extravagance to moderation.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it's like a battery: you've got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

A minute to Dolly's like a lifetime to everybody else.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

Sit and reflect on life itself and you would discover that nothing happens by chance.

That I should die next week, I would still be able to sit at my desk all week and study with perfect equanimity, for I know now that life and death make a meaningful whole.

[In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.

Move with the flow. Don't fight the current. Resist nothing. Let life carry you. Don't try to carry it.

How long does it take your soul to realize that your life is full? The slower the living, the greater the sense of fullness and satisfaction.