“Because love is an act of will. You think it will just happen, but you have to make it so. Even when it’s gone wrong. Wait and see. If love doesn’t come to you, you have to go find it.” Green Witch by Alice Hoffman
“They say that women cannot know the ways of our God, but I have seen His truth with my own eyes. Our God knows all and sees all and has as much compassion for the sparrow as he does for the hawk that hunts it across the sky. Before Him, everything disappears in the wind. If you place a handful of grain on a rock and turn your back, it will fly away. If you leave a sparrow in a tower, it will not be there when you return. If you ask a hawk for mercy, your words will be rendered mute.” The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman
“All that information offered by the natural world suggests that somewhere between the meaninglessness of lives lived in destitute struggle and the emptiness off life lived in swaddled affluence there is daily, ordinary life filled with meaning.” The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben
“The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet.” A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
“I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other. When you’re five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties you know how old you are. I’m twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It’s a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I’m — you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you’re not. You’re thirty-five. And then you’re bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it’s decades before you admit it.” Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
