Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.

–Kurt Vonnegut

Augustine offers one of the pithiest definitions of sin: it is the state of being incurvatus in se (caved in on oneself). The powers of the soul, which are meant to orient us to nature and other human beings and the cosmos and finally the infinite mystery of God, are focussed in on the tiny and infinitely uninteresting ego. Like a black hole, the sinful soul draws all of the light and energy around it into itself.

Robert Barron

A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the mystery of life—a life like the Scriptures, figurative…

John Keats

All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.

Ernest Hemingway

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.

David Bentley Hart

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Matthew Arnold

I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.

H.P. Lovecraft

It is a serious thing, just to be alive, on this fresh morning, in this broken world.

Mary Oliver