I Am Grateful For All Those Dark

It Is An Amazing Thing To Watch People Laugh, The Way It Sort Of Takes Them Over. Sometimes They Really Do Struggle With It . . . So I Wonder What It Is And Where It Comes From, And I Wonder What It Expends Out Of Your System, So That You Have To Do It Till You're Done, Like Crying In A Way, I Suppose, Except That Laughter Is Much More Easily Spent.

More Generally, People Who Lived In A Period When Maternal, Infant And Childhood Mortality Were Still High Would Have Been Tougher Than Most Of Us Can Imagine.

Most Institutions Of Higher Learning In The West Were Founded By And For Religious Denominations. The Supposed Alienation Of Education And Faith Is A Recent Phenomenon. At The Same Time, Neither Education Nor The Lack Of It Predisposes One To Faith.

I Can’t Believe We Will Forget Our Sorrows Altogether. That Would Mean Forgetting That We Had Lived, Humanly Speaking. Sorrow Seems To Me To Be A Great Part Of The Substance Of Human Life.

I Like A Book To Be Full Of The Memory Of What It Is, A Voice In An Endless Conversation, And Yet At The Same Time To Be New.