Luke

“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life: The Classic Essay Collection on the Creative Process

“As your life is in His hands so are the days of your life. Remember you are immortal until your work is done. But don't let the sands of time get into the eye of your vision to reach those who still sit in darkness. They simply must hear. 'Let the dead attend to the affairs of the already dead.' Go thou and attend the affairs of the dying.”
― Jim Elliot

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine