Benjamin

“But if we do not dream, then I think perhaps we are misusing our heads. They are not on our shoulders only to be farms for hair.”
― Brian Doyle, The Plover

“There are some silences that are so huge, and fraught, and haunted, and weighed, and shocked, that they just are; there's nothing you can say about them that makes any sense. All you can do is witness them, and feel some deep ache that such things arrive, and must be endured, with wordless aching all around.”
― Brian Doyle, The Plover

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“There was nothing to which they had to “conform” except the secret, hidden, inscrutable will of God which might differ very notably from one cell to another! It is very significant that one of the first of these Verba (Number 3) is one in which the authority of St. Anthony is adduced for what is the basic principle of desert life: that God is the authority and that apart from His manifest will there are few or no principles: “Therefore, whatever you see your soul to desire according to God, do that thing, and you shall keep your heart safe.”
― Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert