For what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree - filling the air at nights, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men, and women - my own features - mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!

Be free from grief not through insensibility like the irrational animals, nor through want of thought like the foolish, but like a man of virtue by having reason as the consolation of grief.

I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.

Unless we form the habit of going to the Bible in bright moments as well as in trouble, we cannot fully respond to its consolations because we lack equilibrium between light and darkness.

The first thing that we need to say is that God is grieving, too. Uh, a lot of people try to make it sound like 'well everything that happens is God's will.' That's nonsense. God allows everything, but God does not choose everything.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

My idea for 'BoneMan's Daughters' came from the loss of my own daughter when she left home to live with a monster at age 18. I wanted to throttle the man, but she was in love, so all I could do was hope, pray and cry.

It's hard to see your wife deteriorate in front of your eyes.

Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you. Don't waste your pain; use it to help others.

If you listed all the reasons for your faith, and all the things that make you cry, it would be essentially the same list.

We are each of us born into the arms of mortality, the Lord recognizing our need to be held.

the sorrows God sent us brought comfort and strength with them, while the sorrows we brought on ourselves, through folly or wickedness, were by far the hardest to bear.