Allen O'Brien

“The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion. Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience. . . . Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man.”
― C.S. Lewis, Miracles

“My heart can take on any form:
A meadow for gazelles,
A cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka'ba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah,
The scrolls of the Quran.

My creed is Love;
Wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That is my belief,
My faith.”
― Ibn al-Arabī

“Every sound is by definition a stop, which is how we can hear it.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace