John O'Donohue

A lot of suffering is just getting rid of dross in yourself, and lingering and hanging in the darkness is often - I say this against myself - a failure of imagination, to imagine the door into the light.

Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen from one minute to the next. Politics, religion, economics, and the institutions of family and community all have become abruptly unsure.

I must be informed, that one of my great duties was, to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them.