Let God leave us! Let us grow up. Let us walk forward on our own. Because we need the silence of the holy: we need the sacred and equally we need its maddening silence. And in the curious privacy and relief of that silence we can go out into the chaos and commit a thousand acts of minor and gleeful splendor all our own. If it's our tragedy to be left by God, then let it also be our luck.

Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound.

There was the honour and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within - and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums.

Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.

I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and bald as a road. But memory is never like that. It makes hills of feeling in collapsed hours, a scene of enclosure made all precious by its frame.

…suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.

One man’s weakness is another man’s mercy.

Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan--it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution--tiger, tiger burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic. Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will . . . they could never be known in every detail and they never should be.

Helplessness was the one true fountain of youth.

The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?Such a house could even be the whole world.

It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.