Lance Morrow

“Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare.”

“A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights.”

“People travel because it teaches them things they could learn no other way.”

“The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.”

“Evil possesses an instinct for theater, which is why, in an era of gaudy and gifted media, evil may vastly magnify its damage by the power of horrific images.”

“Everywhere you hang your hat is home. Home is the bright cave under the hat.”

“He vanished to the public in order to materialize for his family.”

“The Church became both more accessible and less imposing. It threw itself open to risk.”

“Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.”

“As they marched, the crowds lining the route broke into applause, a sweet and deeply felt spontaneous pattering that was a sort of communal embrace. Welcome home.”

“Vatican II was a force that seized the mind of the Roman Catholic Church and carried it across centuries from the 13th to the 20th.”