Scott Russell Sanders > Quotes

“Home is not where you have to go but where you want to go; nor is it a place where you are sullenly admitted, but rather where you are welcomed – by the people, the walls, the tiles on the floor, the followers beside the door, the play of life, the very grass.”
― Scott Russell Sanders

“When the pain of leaving behind what we know outweighs the pain of embracing it, or when the power we face is overwhelming and neither flight nor fight will save us, there may be salvation in sitting still. And if salvation is impossible, then at least before perishing we may gain a clearer vision of where we are. By sitting still I do not mean the paralysis of dread, like that of a rabbit frozen beneath the dive of a hawk. I mean something like reverence, a respectful waiting, a deep attentiveness to forces much greater than our own.”
― Scott Russell Sanders

“Although "making love" may serve as a polite name for an act that has many rude ones, it's misleading. For lovers do not so much make love as they are remade by love--dipped into the fire, melted down, reshaped. If they are devoted to one another, love will transform them, dissolving the shells of their old separate selves and making them anew.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“Even the disciples, who at times could be dense as bricks, realized that the true neighbor was the one who showed mercy to a stranger.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“That was what it meant to be loved--there were people who would never give up looking and longing for you, no matter how far you wandered lost.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“Life is precarious and improbable, a flame in matter, easily snuffed out. Nature shows no regard for the individual spark, in this creature or that, but only for the spreading of the fire, like an ember passed from cell to cell.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“What laid me low was no mystical vision, no message from God, but a blow of compassion. In a wakeful mind, no force is more terrible, or precious.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“Saints and bodhisattvas may achieve what Christians call mystical union or Buddhists call satori--a perpetual awareness of the force at the heart of the heart of things. For these enlightened few, the world is always lit. For the rest of us, such clarity comes only fitfully, in sudden glimpses or slow revelations. Quakers refer to these insights as openings. When I first heard the term from a Friend who was counseling me about my resistance to the Vietnam War, I though of how on an overcast day, sunlight pours through a break in the clouds. After the clouds drift on, eclipsing the sun, the sun keeps shining behind the veil, and the memory of its light shines on in the mind.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“A good book appeals to what is best in us....”
― Scott Russell Sanders

“If we are ever going to dwell in the house of the Lord, I believe, we do so now. If any house is divinely made, it is this one here, this great whirling mansion of planets and stars.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World

“Striving to convey to this beloved audience of one what was going on around me during those five years, I learned the power of language to map a life, to overcome a distance, to focus attention on what matters most.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“...nothing from the summer carries more lasting allure for me than the memory of sitting with Ruth on the bank of a stream on campus, taking turns reading aloud from the books we held on our laps, while the wind wet leaves gossiping in the old trees above us and the creek rustled in its stony bed.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“...I find it hard not to think of our home as a chrysalis from which the butterfly has flown. I miss my daughter. The rug bristles with the absence of her dancing feet. The windows glint with the history of her looking. Water rings on the sills recall where her teacup should be. The air lacks a sweet buzz.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World

“I sometimes wonder if all other animals, all plants, maybe even stars and rivers and rocks, dwell in steady awareness of God, while humans alone, afflicted with self-consciousness, imagine ourselves apart.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“What's remarkable about old age is not that we wear out but that we last so long in the grip of gravity.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“She wanted to live lightly on the earth, in harmony with its rhythms, all her senses keen and her mind alive and her spirit awake.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, Terrarium

“...I understand Mother's need, whatever she might say on the phone, what she really wants is to hear, before she closes her eyes, the voice of someone who loves her. Love is at last, our only rejoinder to darkness.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“No longer an innocent newborn, Elizabeth can tease, joke, and play make-believe because a gap has opened between what she knows to be so and what she pretends or imagines. More than any other quality, this gap is what distinguishes our species, enabling us to deceive one another and ourselves, but also enabling us to see beyond the way things happen to be, to envision alternatives, to make art and science and revolution, to invent things new under the sun.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

“Since I could not forget the wounds to people and planet, could not unlearn the dismal numbers--of pollution and population and poverty--that foretold catastrophe, I would have to look harder for antidotes, for medicines, for sources of hope.”
― Scott Russell Sanders, Hunting for Hope: A Father's Journeys