Joyce

“She knows that no single specific experience led to her loss of language.

Language worn ragged over thousands of years, from wear and tear by countless tongues and pens. Language worn ragged over the course of her life, by her own tongue and pen. Each time she tried to begin a sentence, she could feel her aged heart. Her patched and repatched, dried-up, expressionless heart. The more keenly she felt it, the more fiercely she clasped the words. Until all at once, her grip slackened. The dulled fragments dropped to her feet. The saw-toothed cogs stopped turning. A part of her, the place within her that had been worn down from hard endurance, fell away like flesh, like soft tofu dented by a spoon.”
― Han Kang, Greek Lessons

“The most destabilizing thing for anyone is to have their core beliefs challenged. As psychologist Virginia Satir puts it, we feel better with the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty. Good or bad, we are attracted to things that are familiar.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

From: The House of Christmas, as anthologized in Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed., The Home Book of Verse, Volume 1 (New York: Henry Holt And Company, 1912); Project Gutenberg Etext #2619.”
― G. K. Chesterton.

“We rant and rave against God for the evil we have to endure but hardly blink at the evil in our own hearts.”
― Joni Eareckson Tada, The God I Love: A Lifetime of Walking with Jesus