random grace notes

“I know nothing, except what everyone knows — if there when Grace dances, I should dance.”
W.H. Auden

“O momentary grace of mortal men,
Which we more hunt for than the grace of God.”
Shakespeare, Richard III

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”
Anne Lamott

“Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.”
Robert Capon

“The sweet sound of amazing grace saves us from the necessity of self-deception.”
Brennan Manning

“Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our need, a joy in total dependence. The good man is sorry for the sins which have increased his need. He is not entirely sorry for the fresh need they have produced.”
C.S. Lewis

“PACO MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY ALL IS FORGIVEN PAPA.”
Ernest Hemingway

“There is only one real law — the law of the universe. It may be fulfilled either by way of judgment or by the way of grace, but it must be fulfilled one way or the other.”
Dorothy Sayers

“He who cannot forgive another breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.”
George Herbert

“In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.”
W.H. Auden

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”
Eugene O’Neill

“What the world needs, I am ashamed to say, is Christian love.”
Bertrand Russell, author of Why I Am Not A Christian

“The beginning of good is perceived in the midst of bad … The simplicity and comprehensiveness of grace — who shall measure it?
Karl Barth

“In life as in dance: Grace glides on blistered feet”
Alice Abrams

“I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.

“Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks.

‘Will my mouth always be like this?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it will. It is because the nerve was cut.’

She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles.

‘I like it,’ he says. ‘It is kind of cute.’

“All at once I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”

Richard Selzer, M.D., Mortal Lessons