Claire

“If there were a choice—and he suspected there was—a choice between, on the one hand, the heights and the depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths.”
― Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

“What we did see was that jealousy is fear: it can corrode even if quite baseless.”
― Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy, and Triumph

“There was day, and there was dusk. It is time to let the night come.”
― Erazim V. Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature

“The conventions of hedonism and of utility can, in fact, be extremely elaborate. Its motives, however, though perhaps wholly free of greed, remain strictly those of need. Goodness remains reducible to utility, rightness to prudence, beauty to aesthetic enjoyment. The point of reference is individual preference, not the generically human vision of a moral sense of life. What is missing is the recognition of intrinsic beauty, rightness, goodness.”
― Erazim V. Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature