“Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child”

“Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.”

“Your own love story? Your paramour may have had lovers before you. But no one has ever loved him the way you do. No one has ever heard music. Not the way you hear it. The songs are beautiful vampires, asleep in your iPod, coming alive at night, aglow. You can have them on your hours, yours to conduct. Music shapes us and we shape it.”

“The duty of the moment is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you.You may not have Christ in a homeless person at your door, but you may have a little child.If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper.So you do it.But you don't just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and that child....There are all kinds of good Catholic things you can do, but whatever they are, you have to realize that there is always the duty of the moment to be done.And it must be done, because the duty of the moment is the duty of God.”

“We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature [...]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.”

“I may have overmothered you and screwed you up in ways large and small, but I think it’s time you took some measure of responsibility for where you choose to put your own penis.”