One life on this earth is all we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be at the very least we are fools … - Frederick Buechner

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?

We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.

So we are told to love. We are told to listen. We are told to look. But a lot of the time we don’t because we choose damn well not to, and because only a saint could do it all the time, I think. You have to choose who to listen to because if you listen to everybody and you look at everybody — seeing every face the way Rembrandt saw that woman’s face — how could you make it down half a city block? You couldn’t. If you listened to what everybody says to you, how could you survive a day? But we can do more than we do — more than we do, surely we could do that.