Scott Russell Sanders Quotes

When the pain of leaving behind what we know outweighs the pain of embracing it, or when the power we face is overwhelming and neither flight nor fight will save us, there may be salvation in sitting still. And if salvation is impossible, then at least before perishing we may gain a clearer vision of where we are. By sitting still I do not mean the paralysis of dread, like that of a rabbit frozen beneath the dive of a hawk. I mean something like reverence, a respectful waiting, a deep attentiveness to forces much greater than our own.

No longer an innocent newborn, Elizabeth can tease, joke, and play make-believe because a gap has opened between what she knows to be so and what she pretends or imagines. More than any other quality, this gap is what distinguishes our species, enabling us to deceive one another and ourselves, but also enabling us to see beyond the way things happen to be, to envision alternatives, to make art and science and revolution, to invent things new under the sun.

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.

Home is not where you have to go but where you want to go; nor is it a place where you are sullenly admitted, but rather where you are welcomed – by the people, the walls, the tiles on the floor, the followers beside the door, the play of life, the very grass.

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.

What's remarkable about old age is not that we wear out but that we last so long in the grip of gravity.

I sometimes wonder if all other animals, all plants, maybe even stars and rivers and rocks, dwell in steady awareness of God, while humans alone, afflicted with self-consciousness, imagine ourselves apart.

Life is precarious and improbable, a flame in matter, easily snuffed out. Nature shows no regard for the individual spark, in this creature or that, but only for the spreading of the fire, like an ember passed from cell to cell.

Nothing from the summer carries more lasting allure for me than the memory of sitting with Ruth on the bank of a stream on campus, taking turns reading aloud from the books we held on our laps, while the wind wet leaves gossiping in the old trees above us and the creek rustled in its stony bed.

I understand Mother's need, whatever she might say on the phone, what she really wants is to hear, before she closes her eyes, the voice of someone who loves her. Love is at last, our only rejoinder to darkness.

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.

...I find it hard not to think of our home as a chrysalis from which the butterfly has flown. I miss my daughter. The rug bristles with the absence of her dancing feet. The windows glint with the history of her looking. Water rings on the sills recall where her teacup should be. The air lacks a sweet buzz.