Quotes

From RADICAL JOY FOR HARD TIMES

”You cannot escape beauty and you cannot stop being attracted to it, because beauty allures. Beauty seduces. Beauty wants you to come closer.”

From RADICAL JOY FOR HARD TIMES

“Acceptance does not mean surrender. It does not mean resignation. Acceptance means I am finally available to the entire spectrum of creative responses.”’

From FIERCE CONSCIOUSNESS

“The right action does not depend upon having a right outcome. It depends on taking the action because that is the action that rises before you in the moment with all its grace and power and majesty -- and because it demands to be done. The action is all.”

From FIERCE CONSCIOUSNESS

“Beauty isn’t only an outward quality that we take in. It is also a way of acting. It is spiritual egress rather than spiritual entrance. It is a recognition of a dilemma, a hardship, a need somewhere outside of ourselves that we respond to with our body. It is an action motivated by knowledge that there is a gap before us and we are capable of filling it.”

From “DRUNK WITH VIRTUE”

“My mother always said a nice girl never lets a boy know how much she likes him. I trusted my mother, so I settled early into the rigors of loving in secret.”

From THE WORLD IS A WAITING LOVER

“The [archetype of the] Beloved personifies the object of the soul’s longing for union with its highest expression. Elusive and alluring, the Beloved seduces us into our own becoming, compelling us to keep moving through tangled paths, wild deserts, mockery, misunderstanding, and, more often that not, a Vulcan’s forge of yearning love that we discover we cannot bear to live without….”

From “ON THE MOORS OF OMAHA”

“Wuthering Heights gave me the inkling that being contained like the popular girls in my class was not so advantageous after all. In fact, studying that book, I encountered not only characters who seemed to have the same kind of unscratchable itch I did, but a new grasp of how an author could throw herself into things like longing, rage, jealousy, and madness as if into a “range of gaunt thorns” and emerge, yes, of course, stung, but with a tale that she had created in the process.”

From “THE COAL REMEMBERS”

“One of the rewards of spending time with waste places is the startlement of beauty they hold in reserve. They take what has happened to them and deal with it. They are pushy and creative, and they muddle through, working with what they’ve got without expecting any favors.”