The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Scott Russell Sanders

Scott Russell Sanders

Striving to convey to this beloved audience of one what was going on around me during those five years, I learned the power of language to map a life, to overcome a distance, to focus attention on what matters most.

language, writing

Scott Russell Sanders

What laid me low was no mystical vision, no message from God, but a blow of compassion. In a wakeful mind, no force is more terrible, or precious.

Scott Russell Sanders

Even the disciples, who at times could be dense as bricks, realized that the true neighbor was the one who showed mercy to a stranger.

mercy, neighbor

Scott Russell Sanders

Saints and bodhisattvas may achieve what Christians call mystical union or Buddhists call satori–a perpetual awareness of the force at the heart of the heart of things. For these enlightened few, the world is always lit. For the rest of us, such clarity comes only fitfully, in sudden glimpses or slow revelations. Quakers refer to these insights as openings. When I first heard the term from a Friend who was counseling me about my resistance to the Vietnam War, I though of how on an overcast day, sunlight pours through a break in the clouds. After the clouds drift on, eclipsing the sun, the sun keeps shining behind the veil, and the memory of its light shines on in the mind.