The Hour I First Believed

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

that's the funny thing about mazes: what's baffling on the ground begins to makes sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself". (p. 717)

I don't know. Maybe we're all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we're scared shitless of explosive change. But we're fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium--the devils let loose from their cages.

Most helpful, Mr. Caelum," she said. "Very, very useful information. And now, shall we hear from Saint Augustine?" I shrugged. "Why not?" I said Dr. P read from a blood-red leather book. "My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry.... Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?" She closed the book, then reached across the table and took Maureen's hand in hers. "Does that passage speak to you?" she asked. Mo nodded and began to cry. "And so, Mr. Caelum, good-bye." Because the passage had spoken to me, too, it took me a few seconds to react. "Oh," I said. "You want me to leave?" "I do. Yes, yes.

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

sometimes when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.

Sarcasm is a suit of armor.

I wasn't a cynic; I was a banged-up realist.

It's like there's this wave coming toward me, but there's nothing I can do about it. And then it reaches me, crashes over me and...and I'm done for another day. I just give up. Give in to it. Because how do you stop a wave? You don't. And you're wise to recognize your powerlessness to do so. But what you can do is learn how to negotiate this wave. Work within the context of its inevitability.

..."I love you" was just three meaningless words without the actions that went with them

It just wasn't for me, and anyway, those people were a lot more far gone than I was. More in my father's league than mine. I just cut back a little. Less beer and liquor, more jogging. I was fine.

...there was no shorthand for "I'm sorry." You were obliged to speak those two words.

I do believe that there's life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself.

God, that’s always the thing you have to decide with high school kids: what to make an issue of, what to let go.

Zinnia always wants to hug me and pat me because she has a boy my same age named Melvin. I said maybe some day Melvin could come play at our farm, and I could bring him to the maze and show him the shortcuts. Zinnia started crying. That’s when I seen that she has freckles.

Our ancestors move along with us, in underground rivers and springs too deep for chaos to reach.

The non-jocks, the readers, the gay kids, the ones starting to stew about social injustice: for these kids, "letting your freak flag fly" is both self discovery and self defense. You cry for this bunch at the mandatory pep assemblies. Huddled together, miserably, in the upper reaches of the bleachers, wearing their oversized raincoats and their secondhand Salvation Army clothes, they stare down at the school-sanctioned celebration of the A list students. They know bullying, these kids--especially the ones who frefuse to exist under the radar. They're tripped in the hallway, shoved against lockers, pelted with Skittles in the lunchroom. For the most part, their tormentors are stealth artists. The freaks know where there's refuge: I the library, the theater program, art class, creative writing.

Vicarious traumatization. It can happen to those who bear secondary witness to the traumas of others.

We lived, lulled, on the fault line of chaos. Change could come explosively, and out of nowhere.

He who goes questing for what he wants may discover, along the way, what he needs.

What fools men are, and what an evil thing is war.

For all I know God may be nothing more or nothing less than the sound of the moving water outside your window.

You think it's worth it? That we're over there for the right reasons?" He shrugged. "Politics is a luxury you can't necessarily afford when you're over there. You just get up, do your job, and embrace the suck.

If Pierre buys a horse for two hundred francs and Jacques buys a mule for a hundred and forty, and the two enter into a partnership and decide to trade their creatures for a piece of land that costs four hundred and eighty francs, then how long will it take a lame Frenchman to borrow a silk umbrella?

Explosive bifurcation is the sudden transition that wrenches the system out of one order, and into another.

AFTER I DELIVERED VELVET BACK to the farmhouse that night, I entered the condo and walked over to my Minotauromachia. And as I stood before it, it was crystal clear to me that the terrible monster was doomed in the face of the powerful little girl.

Does not the New Testament exhort us to extend a hand to one who has fallen? Professor Sumner would have us place a foot on the fallen one as he lies prone and pitiable, the better to remain his superior.