For Equilibrium, a Blessing:
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.
As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.
Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.
As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.
As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.
As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.
May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of god.
John O'Donohue
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TIM O'BRIEN Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When ...
MEGHAN O'ROURKE There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get.... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a ...
STEWART O'NAN We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate those ...
TIM O'BRIEN It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero.
TIM O'BRIEN Experience has taught me that what you love, you should love all the harder because someday it will ...
RONAN O'BRIEN A hat should be taken off when greeting a lady, and left off the rest of your life. Nothing looks mo...
P.J. O'ROURKE Rising up into the air, they took to the sky and flew. From west and beyond west, into the wind and ...
PAT O'SHEA You're the fire burning inside of me.
KELVIN O'RALPH I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony. I do not crave security. I wis...
PETER O'TOOLE I guess relationships are just funny like that. It's impossible to figure out why some work out and ...
JENNY O'CONNELL If you work really hard, and you're kind, amazing things will happen.
CONAN O'BRIEN Lasting healing comes from being curious rather than controlling, from mercy rather than manipulatio...
MARY O'MALLEY What the hell is that?" he asked.
"Magic mushrooms."
"I've always wanted to try those," he...
HEATHER O'NEILL I've always been a pretty good researcher," said Bronwyn modestly.
Oh, so that we sha...
DANIEL O'MALLEY The plates of the continental shelf - the world itself - had shifted, and their first concern was pu...
STEWART O'NAN The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When ...
P.J. O'ROURKE The Universe and Spirit do not understand limitations...PEOPLE invented limitations!
JENNIFER O'NEILL Not only have we not done the good things that God really wants us to do, but in fact, we’ve done ...
ERIN O'RIORDAN Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR By subsidiarity is meant the principle that responsibilities should be devolved to the lowest viable...
DENIS O'BRIEN For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the fles...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dr...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought ab...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be kno...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
P.J. O'ROURKE I have been told by the third grade teacher that my daughter Poppet is reading at middle school leve...
P.J. O'ROURKE My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.
FLANN O'BRIEN When all else fails, there's always delusion.
CONAN O'BRIEN You would not want to be responsible for someone else’s happiness, so please do not hold someone e...
JENNIFER O'NEILL The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw ev...
JOSEPH O'NEILL I was always the girl growing up who just wasn’t quite like the rest of them. I liked working hard...
R.B. O'BRIEN You don't know. When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving,...
TIM O'BRIEN They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these wer...
TIM O'BRIEN I was a coward. I went to the war.
TIM O'BRIEN To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing ...
TIM O'BRIEN Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mat...
TIM O'BRIEN Well, right now I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know, I guess it's like bein...
TIM O'BRIEN Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of y...
TIM O'BRIEN It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn s...
TIM O'BRIEN In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seem...
TIM O'BRIEN It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course,...
TIM O'BRIEN He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, ...
TIM O'BRIEN And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for....
TIM O'BRIEN What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...
TIM O'BRIEN It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to d...
TIM O'BRIEN you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.
TIM O'BRIEN But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the w...
TIM O'BRIEN War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and...
TIM O'BRIEN I survived, but it's not a happy ending.
TIM O'BRIEN Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when y...
TIM O'BRIEN The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream alo...
TIM O'BRIEN