Mirror Mirror

The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.

If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.

Even God used silence as a strategy.

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go.

I believe in the floor. I put it in place and I walk on it. Faith is a floor. If you don't work at making it for yourself, you have nothing to walk on.

Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.

He had forgotten how convincing the world could look, how sure of itself: its outlines and edges; it's gradations, recessions, protrusions; it's startling and vulgar colors.

What more does one ask of life, really, but to stagger from moment to moment with a reason to wake and wait for the next reason to wake?

But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don't lie about men, only women.

Happiness now sometimes meant turning away from what one remembered of earlier, better happiness.

Please, I know nothing of the world, except my father is lost in it.

No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.

Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.

I’m a priest, I know better than most when a lie is permitted.

The years peeled slowly off, one by one, or perhaps dozens at a time.

The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eyes, and she who centers herself in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction.

Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.