Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.

True conversation is an interpenetration of worlds, a genuine intercourse of souls, which doesn't have to be self-consciously profound but does have to touch matters of concern to the soul.

The minds of some of our statesmen, like the pupil of the human eye, contract themselves the more, the stronger light there is shed upon them.

Humility, that low, sweet root, From which all heavenly virtues shoot.

Those things, good Lord, that we pray for, give us also the grace to labor for.

When once the young heart of a maiden is stolen, The maiden herself will steal after it soon.

Faith, fanatic Faith, once wedded fast To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last.

The family the soul wants is a felt network of relationship, an evocation of a certain kind of interconnection that grounds, roots, and nestles.

Who can help loving the land that has taught us Six hundred and eighty-five ways to dress eggs?

The heart is a mystery-not a puzzle that can't be solved, but a mystery in the religious sense: unfathomable, beyond manipulation, showing traces of the finger of God.