Keith Miller Quotes

the way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person's soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack.

Stories are life," protested Pico. "Without them, books would be only paper and ink, with them they breathe, the reader is drawn in, the stories become him.

And he loves to read. He loves the whisper of the pages and the way his fingertips catch on rough paper, the pour of the words up from the leaves, through soft light, into his eyes, the mute voice in his ears.

The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off.

A forest is mystery but the desert is truth. Life pared to the bone.

Memories must enter the bloodstream, must churn awhile through the heart's mill, must be crushed and polished, be nearly forgotten or cling like burs to other stories before they spill forth in purple patterns, shapes of small bones and worm rot, shapes of clouds and the spaces between leaves.

Conversations in the flesh are the first drafts toward the later conversations of the mind, where words and ideas are sorted and elaborated, recast.

Reading is the strangest art. Your eye takes a shape, turns it into music, then story, then spirit, so a curl of ink laid long ago by a sliver of reed can become, a thousand years later, your own breath.

A city of squalls, foggy mornings, intervals of blue and white so immaculate the eyes ached. A city of readers, coffee drinkers, kissers on sidewalks, sad faces at wet windows. A city of umbrellas, woolen scarves, raincoats, cigarettes, wineglasses, cognac.

Well, I guess I'll become a thief, then," said Pica unhappily. "though I don't think I'll be much good. I'm a pacifist, you see?

I am discovering that in trying to find God's will and the shape of the Christian life I have begun an adventure so great that its total completion will always be ahead.

He skims over the sea weeping, the last winged man, salt water falling to salt water. And though he tries to flee his tears, the sea itself is all the tears of those who've ever wept. Even the sea, even the sundering sea will not set the sad poet apart, for the country of sorrows is the size of the heart.

We never look at the grass, though it is ubiquitous. If it's left alone to shake its hair loose it will produce tiny tassels and flowers, miniature and beautiful, that I'd never noticed before. Beauty is so often size and commotion for us, and fancy labels, that the subterfuge of loveliness all around us goes unseen.

Beyond the stars you see are other stars, stars beyond stars,' she told him, 'and all are dreams, like shoals of fish in the oceans of the night.

Who knows how long he might have stayed in that city, cozy, dousing his guilt with wine, cauterizing it with tobacco, had the city remained static. But keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot.

He went to sleep as soon as they'd gone, waking in the middle of the night and walking outside into a sky whose stars hung so low he felt he strolled among them and he could see indeed, so clear the air, the very flames of their inner workings.

...his favorite books, those he'd read over and over so he knew just the lurch his heart would make when he turned the page and encountered the illustration of the despondent dragon under a half-moon or the fervor with which he flipped the final pages of another, the story so vivid he felt his relationship with that book was less an act of reading than a visit, a place he went to.

Our tremendous drive for social acceptance and toward conformity in our time is causing us to train our children to be a generation of young liars who do not even realise they are lying. We train our children to be subtly dishonest almost from the crib. "Shh... don't cry in front of all these people.

With a sense of fulfillment stronger even than the sating of his hunger that morning, for he'd been starved of books much longer than of food, Pico joined the browsers. Inhaling the odor of mildewed hide as if he'd entered a confectionery, fondling the bindings of stippled leather or buckled cloth, running his fingers across the raised letters of the titles as though blind, for a moment he wished he'd saved the coin to buy a book, then giggled at his folly.

Twilight is the hour I love,' he told her, 'the hour where nothing is quite itself, all things teetering at the edges of their names. Here I can be alone and a stranger to myself.

Each and every one of you has a vision or a dream to live out. But God doesn’t expect you to do it in your ability.

He thinks he will drown as the memories flood back, he cannot breathe, the lock is breached and his lungs are filled too bursting. But memories are seldom fatal.

What if the goal wasn’t to win an argument but to win a friend?

In trying to commit my life to finding and participating in some of the purposes of Christ, as I can determine them, my energies and abilities are gradually being focused and are working together.

It may seem an easy task to disregard a secret but secrets are like splinters beneath the flesh, the infection spreads and spreads and then the limb turns gangrenous and must be sawn away, all for the sake of a sliver of wood.

It's hard writing a love letter when I've never been in love, but love letters aren't really about love; they are about want, luring a future fantasy into the present, so you can feel it—between your fingers, against your lips. I have been looking at it all wrong. It isn't about what I have but what I'm missing. Like a prayer that has no god to hear it. Everyone calls it love, but I think it's something deeper, and the word "love" is just a placeholder.

Love is two blind people sword fighting, love is a queen on a desert island, love is self-immolation, love is running scared in the dark, love is two people each of whose saliva is poison for the other, love is an empty house, a sunken boat, a crippled dancer.

Twilight is the hour i love" he told her "the hour where nothing is quite itself, all things teetering at the edges of their names. Here I can be alone and a stranger to myself

A drunkenness brought on by gulped beer on an empty stomach produces raucous sniping, atrocious singing, nausea. But a tizzy induced by impeccable wine slowly sipped during a marvelous meal and burnished by a superb brandy elicits miraculous conversation.

And he loves to read. He loves the whisper of the pages and the way his fingertips catch on rough paper, the pour of the words up from the leaves, through the soft light, into his eyes, the mute voice in his ears.

The Holy Spirit knows what was determined for you before the foundation of the world. He knows exactly what your purpose is. And He desperately wants to impart the anointing upon you to fulfill that purpose.

A Christian marriage is [not] one with no problems or even a marriage with fewer problems. (It may well mean more problems.) But it does mean a life in which two people are able to accept each other and love each other in the midst of problems and fears. It means a marriage in which selfish people can accept selfish people without constantly trying to change them—and even accept themselves, because they realize personally that they have been accepted by Christ.

We may feel angry because they don’t guess who we are or what we want from them, because “if they really loved us,” of course, they would be able to guess.

Jewish law might forbid befriending Gentiles, but God’s law never did. Peter narrowed God’s plan until it encompassed his tribe alone. Of course, we do the same thing when we think that God is for my tribe, my country, my people, and my party.

Right now, right where you are, you can receive this gift from the Holy Spirit. Ask Him to release a divine impartation for your destiny. Declare this: “Holy Spirit,You know my future.According to John 16:14-15, the Word says You will transmit to me what Jesus is declaring about me. I know the Lord knew me before the foundations of the earth. I know He knew me before I was ever born. And right now I ask You for a divine impartation of the anointing, which will equip me for what You intend for my life.

Keith Klouda embodies versatility and mastery in both law enforcement and construction. His retired status as an NYPD Police Officer evolved into owning Pristine Construction & Contracting Inc., where his 32-year journey enriches every project. A certified lead paint remover and skilled framer, Keith's expertise stems from a vocational carpentry education.

Courage is the swallowing of one's life, whole

In Japan, there is no question of the existence of ishin-denshin, a mutual understanding that arises through unspoken communication.  The word itself means “what the mind knows, the heart transmits” and suggests the same esoteric heart transmission as is found in Tibetan Buddhism.  There, the true understanding of the nature of reality cannot be communicated in words, and the understanding must instead be transmitted from the heart of the master to the student.  In Original Wisdom, Robert Wolff described the uncanny knowledge of Malaysian aboriginal tribes.  But in these cultures, psychic ability is not a goal to be strived after.  Instead, it is merely a fact of living.

You had three books, now you have four. This is how libraries are built, book by book, until they are burned again. Other books will arrive from across the sea for this is not the first burning. The library has burned before, it will burn again and be rebuilt. Book by book

Somewhere," he told her, "somewhere else lived a boy and a girl beside the sea and as they grew older they grew more transparent. At first blue blood vessels and then bones bloomed beneath the skin but soon they could see the shapes of the world behind their bodies, the shudder of leaves like shadows in the brain, a butterfly's flutter in the mutter of the heart, beetles in the coils of the bowels. They watched wine whirl down each other's throats and the sun rise up each other's spines, stepping vertically vertebra to vertebra. Soon the only substance they obtained was when their bodies overlapped and so they clasped each other, peering for the vestiges of eyes, teeth, ears, smears against the landscape. And one day they kissed and disappeared.

We are called not just to operate in an occasional gift, but also to live in a place of perpetual flow of the Holy Spirit. As a believer, you can wake up every day in fresh anointing; you can live as an overcomer. You can be a finisher of the race that God has called you to run. You can do exceedingly abundantly above and beyond anything you can think or imagine, according to God’s power that works for you and from you. Every believer has the potential to see the impossible become possible. I long for you to know Him, not just as “holy,” but also “wholly,” with every fiber of your being filled with Him, moment by moment, for now and evermore.

The sky is the sea glittering with minnows caught in the nets of the rain, a flute at dusk is a lover's tongue in the ear, an eye is a talon, a cinder, a star.

I have yet to meet a man who can quench my thirst. I'm looking for a man as strong as I am, stronger than meat, than liquor, a man brave as a frightened mother, with a heart hard as a tooth. The hearts of men are too easily stolen, they are not vigilant in guarding the gates of their ribs and my thieving fingers can always reach beneath the sternum and snatch it." "What do you do with their hearts?" "I eat them.

in Solitude; also James Martin’s introduction to Merton and others, Becoming Who You Are), Henri Nouwen (The Inner Voice of Love), Gregory Mayers (Listen to the Desert), Rowan Williams (Tokens of Trust), J. Keith Miller (Compelled to Control) and David Benner (Spirituality and the Awakening Self). Let me also include here Frederica Matthews-Green (The Jesus Prayer and At the Corner of East and Now) for gentle and compelling introductions to Eastern Orthodoxy, a direction to which I never once nodded throughout my entire seminary career, and James Fowler’s classic Stages of Faith. Others I want to mention are M. Holmes Hartshorne (The Faith to Doubt) and Daniel Taylor (The Myth of Certainty and The Skeptical Believer). I could go on, but each of these were one ah-ha moment after another, encouraging in me a different perspective on what the life of faith can look like, which I found both unsettling and also healing and freeing. These books have become old friends.