12 quotes
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
A Grief Observed (1961)
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
A Grief Observed (1961)
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
A Grief Observed (1961)
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
A Grief Observed (1961)
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
A Grief Observed (1961)
It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
A Grief Observed (1961)
It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness and chivalry 'masculine' when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as 'feminine'.
A Grief Observed (1961)
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
A Grief Observed (1961)
But then again of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all.
A Grief Observed (1961)
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
A Grief Observed (1961)
If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
A Grief Observed (1961)
Not my idea of God, but God.
A Grief Observed (1961)