• What do you think hurts more: a father who’s strict or a father who’s uninterested?

    —Fr. Elijah Iskander

  • “There’s a solo journey that everyone goes on. You can be with all your people [that you love], but if you don’t feel fulfilled with the place or your purpose in the place, then it doesn’t matter how much love you have [around you].”

    —Damon Dominique

  • Love has no reason, it’s true, one loves and that’s that;

    Boredom
    Alberto Moravia

  • To marry or not?

    Constantine Yiannitsiotis, someone who knew Elder Porphyrios closely for many years, relates:

    A friend was facing the dilemma of marriage or celibacy. The Elder offered many prospects of salvation and so he was freed from the anxiety of the dilemma, even before he had decided one way or the other. He did this by saying, “Don’t torment yourself unfairly, by putting pressure on yourself to make the choice now. Free yourself from that persistent thought and give all your attention to how to love Christ who loves you. Everything belongs to Christ, our past as well as our present and our future, where His Providence is revealed even to the very last detail of our lives. You could have a family; you could go, wherever you like, to dedicate yourself. You could, however, do none of those things and stay at home, as you are now, again you can be saved, it is enough that you love Christ. Christ will bring about the solution that suits you most, that will speak clearly in your heart. Do not be sad, you are on Christ’s road even now.”

    Ref: With Elder Porphyrios A Spiritual Child Remember (Constantine Yiannitsiotis)

  • August Strindberg once said, “Could there be anything more terrifying than a husband and wife who hate each other?”

    — Ingmar Bergman
    (1973) Scenes From a Marriage (TV Mini Series)
    Episode 1 of 6

  • It is also not unknown for creative people, once they have achieved an intimate relationship, to lose some of their imaginative drive.

    Solitude, a Return to the Self
    Anthony Storr

  • “Adultery is always a matter of choice; no amount of lust, and no passion of love, can overwhelm a person’s capacity to choose between fidelity and betrayal.”

    On Living Simply
    St. John Chrysostom

  • My child, it often happens that a man seeks ardently after something he desires and then when he has attained it he begins to think that it is not at all desirable; for affections do not remain fixed on the same thing, but rather flit from one to another.  It is no very small matter, therefore, for a man to forsake himself even in things that are very small.

    A man’s true progress consists in denying himself, and the man who has denied himself is truly free and secure.

    —Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

  • A few Sundays ago, I was speaking to a zealous young man during the coffee hour after the Liturgy. He is a married man with a pregnant wife, and he struggles to find meaning and purpose in his work and in “the way things are” in his life and his extended family. He was lamenting that he wanted to experience a life of prayer and quiet, that he thought that such a life would bring him peace and purpose. And although I generally do not assume that I know God’s will for someone else (heck, I seldom know God’s will for myself), I was able to say confidently to this young man that monasticism was not God’s will for his life. I told him that he had already chosen a path and it was on that path that he would find his salvation, not in wishing or wondering or imagining a different path.

    —Fr. Michael Gillis, Muddling Through The Snirt Of This World

  • It was not a question of love on my part, the idea hadn’t even crossed my mind. And love without hope is something else, something painful certainly, but something that never generates the same sense of closeness, the same sensitivity to the intonations of the other, even in the one who loves without hope, they are too lost in vain and frenetic expectation to retain even the smallest amount of lucidity, to be able to interpret any signal correctly; in short I was in a situation that had, in my life, no precedent.

    The Possibility of an Island
    Michel Houellebecq