Stephanie Flear

“The path of self-mastery is not easy, especially for a person who has grown accustomed to giving in to his impulses rather than controlling them. If he perseveres, though, such a person will feel a growing sense of his own dignity. He will begin to experience the body as a gift, and sexuality as a sign of communion—a reflection of God’s love. Freedom, the fruit of self-control, is the foundation for love between persons. This is why love can only flourish where there is purity of heart.”
― John Paul II, Theology of the Body in Simple Language

“The only people here were just this aging couple, getting a little too small for their skin, their hair turning white, standing it might be in the middle of the kitchen or the garden or the barn lot, hugging each other the way the hungry eat, in a hurry for night to fall. We still had the children to think about and worry about, of course, wherever they were, and our work always ahead of us, and the place always around us with its needs and demands, and yet for a while there I would think that this, this right now, was all the world that I held in my arms. It was like falling in love, only more than that; we knew too much by then for it to be only that. It was knowing that love was what it was, and life would not complete it and death would not stop it.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“It was like falling in love, only more than that; we knew too much by then for it to be only that. It was knowing that love was what it was, and life would not complete it and death would not stop it.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, the Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”
― George Gordon Byron, Manfred