in a flash of insight he became aware of the innumerable necessary evils of which life for her was made up.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

Be thou comforted, little dog, Thou too in Resurrection shall have a little golden tail.

But Jesus answered me with these words and said: Sin is necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.

Time brought resignation and a melancholy sweeter than common joy.

We hear tears loudly on this side of Heaven. What we don't take time to contemplate are the even louder cheers on the other side of death's valley.

There is a place called 'heaven' where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet.

Shall I tell you the difference between you and your statue? No. But I want to. It's startling to see the same elements used in two compositions with opposite themes. Everything about you in that statue is the theme of exaltation. But your own theme is suffering. Suffering? I'm not conscious of having shown that. You haven't. That's what I meant. No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain.

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

The tree was intact, not cut or broken by wind. What a waste. After maybe centuries of survival it had simply let go of the ground, the wide fist of its root mass ripped up and resting naked above a clay gash in the wooded mountainside. Like herself, it just seemed to have come loose from its station in life.

I was struck through with my own wayward brand of reverence: praise be the lord of all plagues and secret afflictions! If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites.