“[V]iolence is what happens when we don’t know what to do with our suffering.”

Parker Palmer

Be so absorbed in the work that you neither see nor hear your enemy.

Joy Williams

“Never let anyone change what you came to the page to do.”

Lee Martin, in the last writing class of my MFA

“I believe a man should live in his own country and I think the deracination of human beings leads to frustration, in one way or another obstructing the light of the soul. I can live only in my own country. I cannot live without having my feet and my hands on it and my ear against it, without feeling the movement of its waters and its shadows,

“If you chase two rabbits, you will catch neither.”

Russian Proverb

“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see, and they will not be a substitute for seeing.” - Flannery O’Connor (Mystery & Manners)

As unnecessary as a well is

To a village on the banks of a river,

So unnecessary are all scriptures

To someone who has seen the truth

• Bhagavad Gita

Before he died, Rabbi Zusya said: “In the world to come they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

from Parker Palmer's book

Brueggemann: “[E]very totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”