Michael Paul Styler

“Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, all embarrassment into laughter. In biblical faith, brokenness is never celebrated as an end in itself.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“William Butler Yeats was after the same point when he remarked: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
― Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry

“It's a nice big fat philosophical question, about: how do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”
― Toni Morrison