Mitch Wiley

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“The light that shines farthest shines brightest nearest home.”
― C.T. Studd

“Ambergris"

This body, tapped of every drop of breath,
In vast corruption of its swollen pride,
Proclaims itself the very whale of death;
Yet, I believe, the hand that plumbs its side
Will gather dissolution's sweet increase.
Exquisite fern of death--in nature, ambergris.

Meanwhile, thinking of love, I have been dressed
For such destruction. Though it surely break,
Come pluck the deep wild kernel of my breast,
That wafer of devotion, and partake
Of its compacted sweetness, till it bring
The sould to rise upon its fleshly wing.

If gentle heart be scorned, in scorn of it
I shall immerse it in such bitterness,
Bather every pulse in such an acid wit,
That from my mammoth, cold, and featureless
Event of age, my enemied will flee,
Whereas my friends will stay and pillage me.
Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2000)”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky