A Quote by Annie Dillard

So the Midwest nourishes us [...] and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters [...]. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities. Mother knew we would go; she encouraged us.
I have a strange fascination with the Midwest. I'm waiting to find out that my parents are actually from the Midwest. I grew up in Beverly Hills, up the street, and I just feel comfortable there. I've shot in Minneapolis, in Detroit, in St. Louis, in Omaha - they would say they're the Plains, not the Midwest - and I love it.
It is a sweet thing that we serve a dissatisfied God who has destinations in mind for us that we would never choose for ourselves. It really is a good thing that he will not be satisfied until he has gotten us exactly where he created us and re-created us to be. Most of us would have been satisfied to stay at home, and many of us would have quit the journey long before it was completed. But our heavenly Father won't give up until each one of his children has completed the journey.
When we were little, we kept close to our mother in a dark alley or if dogs barked at us. Now, when we feel temptations of the flesh, we should run to the side of our Mother in Heaven, by realizing how she is to us, and by means of aspirations. She will defend us and lead us to the light.
God's love has a width, length, height, and depth, but we will never reach the end of it. Our capacity to experience God's love will be exhausted long before God's capacity to give it is strained. The picture of having Christ dwell inside us by faith presents us with compelling and comforting possibilities. What Christ does in us and through us will always be 'exceedingly abundantly above all we ask or think.'
Let the Black man go - stop lying to us that you love us. And if you really love us, let us go and give us some of this territory that we can call our own; and give us the billions of dollars that we can get started with land and with tractors and the things that will make us an independent nation.
being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.
Our Father awaits us with great zeal and desire, and with love He will see us returning from afar, and He will look upon us with compassionate eyes, and we shall be dear to Him, and He will fall on our neck running and embrace us and kiss us with His Holy Love. He will not reproach us, and He will no longer remember our sins and iniquities, and all the holy angles and all His elect will begin to rejoice over us.
Every time you have a desire, in a certain sense you have a goal, something you would like to be, do, or have. Some desires are merely passing fancies, but others stay with us and go deeper. Our desires and our goals give us direction and focus. They help point us down our path of action in our life.
You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.
She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.
Nature will not let us stay in any one place for too long. She will let us stay just long enough to gather the experience necessary to the unfolding and advancement of the soul. This is a wise provision, for should we stay there too long, we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible. Nature demands change in order that we may advance.
John and I were lucky because our mother was a strong woman with high expectations and a strong sense of values. She encouraged us to pursue things we were interested in and not think about what other people wanted us to do.
Let us dig our gardens and not be elsewhere; Let us take long walks in the open air... Let us bathe in the rivers and lakes... Let us indulge in games... Let us be more simple: simple and true in our gestures, in our words, and simple and true in our minds above all. Let us be ourselves.
The challenge life presents to each of us is to become truly ourselves--not the self we have imagined or fantasized about, not the self that our friends want us to be, not the self our ego would have us be, but the self God has ordained us to be from before we were in our mother's womb.
Let us ask Mary to help us respond to violence, to conflict and to war, with the power of dialogue, reconciliation and love. She is our mother: may she help us to find peace; all of us are her children!
We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place. We stay there even though we go away and there are things in us we can find again only by going back there. We travel to ourselves when we go to a place. We have covered a stretch of our life no matter how brief it may have been but by traveling to ourselves we must confront our own loneliness. And isn’t it so that everything we do is done out of fear of our loneliness? Isn’t that why we renounce all the things we will regret at the end of our life?
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