Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don't want to do so.

God will show you who to partner with when the time comes.

To speak to Him thus is easier by nature for woman than for man because a natural desire lives in her to give herself completely to someone. When she has once realized that no one other than God is capable of receiving her completely for Himself and that it is sinful theft toward God to give oneself completely to one other than Him, then the surrender is no longer difficult and she becomes free of herself.

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.

There was such love as she had dreamed, and she meant to go on believing in it and cherishing the thought that she was worthy of it.

When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed.

Why do you do this to me? she cried. Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead? No, I have nothing to give you instead, he said, sitting up and turning so that he faced her. If I had, it should be yours, you know.

What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness?

Beneath our questions about God's generosity and his care for our needs is something darker. What we really care about is our wants.

My wants are what concern me. That's where the battle must be fought.