“If love was a river, then Martha's was the Nile: enormous, life-giving, and at regular intervals capable of drowning you in murk for reasons you didn't understand. But you couldn't do without it. And no one expected you to.”

“To Martha it seemed that she stood outside life. The world went by her, colourless shapes on a flat pale background. Nothing had solidity or warmth. She felt numb, as though she could never be passionately alive again.”

“Am I such a slave as that? Dependent on a man to complete me! I thought I couldn't be anything without him- I can be my own creator!”

“The command is "Do no work." Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don't have to DO to BE. accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.”

“And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That's the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want.”

“Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, and loneliness. You will see that the world is not on your shoulders after all. Your will find yourself, and God will find you in new ways. Silence also brings Sabbath to you. It completes solitude, for without it you cannot be alone. Far from being a mere absence, silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life. God does not ordinarily compete for our attention. In silence we come to attend. Lastly, fasting is done that we many consciously experience the direct sustenance of God to our body and our whole person.”

“We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.”