Sublime

“You got a sweet little voice,” Early told her once, grinning at her across their porch. But what seemed more likely is that people were lonely.

Miracles leave no trace. He had decided, hearing his father preach on the subject, that they happened once as a sort of commentary on the blandness and inadequacy of the reality they break in on, and then vanish, leaving a world behind that refutes the very idea that such a thing could have happened.

“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.”—Milan Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980.

There is an earned innocence, I believe, which is as much to be honored as the innocence of children. I have often wanted to preach about that. For all I know, I have preached about it. When the Lord says you must “become as one of these little ones,” I take Him to mean you must be stripped of all the accretions of smugness and pretense and trivial

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

“Something happened that made you decide you’d had all the life you could stand. So you ended it there. Except you have to stay alive, for your father.”

There were times in his youth when his imaginations of destruction were so powerful that the deed itself seemed as bad as done. So he did it. It was as if the force of the idea were strong enough that his collaboration in it was trivial.