Robert James Waller Quotes

If the infinity of the sea may call out thus, perhaps when a man is growing old, calls come to him, too, from another infinity still darker and more deeply mysterious; and the more he is wearied by life the dearer are those calls to him.

A ship's engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew's magnifying glass. Without really knowing, we divine; our life has a sister ship, following quietly another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands.

Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.

But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

A book lives as long as it is unfathomed.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, Past the wan-mooned abysses of night, I have lived o'er my lives without number, I have sounded all things with my sight.

How deeply one felt when alone.

And I leave my post of observation and find I have had enough of this outside life; I feel that there is nothing more that I can learn here, either now or at any time. And I long to say a last goodbye to everything up here, to go down into my burrow never to return again, let things take their course, and not try to retard them with my profitless vigils.

When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once.

eternity is a depth which no geometry can measure, no arithmetic calculate, no imagination conceive, no rhetoric describe.

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.

I've been around for a very long time, I've been around since God had baby cheeks.

The image of Eternity--the throne Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

his voice was centuries old

In the life of the individual when love awakens it is older than everything else, because when it exists it seems as if it has existed for a long time; it presupposes itself back into the distant past until all searching ends in the inexplicable origin.

The Nile, forever new and old, Among the living and the dead, Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled.

Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.

Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?

I had this feeling like the solution to everything would be down there if only I could dig through all those clouds.

Some day I shall sing to thee in the sunrise of some other world, I have seen thee before in the light of the earth, in the love of man.

THE ABANDONED VALLEY Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?

Don't be upset that it takes a long, long time to find wisdom because nobody knows where wisdom can be found. It tends to break out at unexpected times like a rare virus and mostly people with compassion and understanding are susceptible to it.

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

Time is clearly not our natural dimension. Thus it is that we are never really at home in time. Alternately, we find ourselves wishing to hasten the passage of time or to hold back the dawn. We can do neither, of course, but whereas the fish is at home in water, we are clearly not at home in time--because we belong to eternity.