Anne Carson Quotes

What I don't think I knew when I was young was that 'losing your faith' is actually part of the plan for a lot of people - that it's actually maybe the most beautiful and graceful thing that can happen. The mystery of God can handle all of it. It can handle all of your thoughts, all of your doubts, all of your folly. It's all in the game.

I have been contending all my life, and always with God.

What I have experienced, and experienced repeatedly, is the silence of God. For many years, this was a distressing matter for me. I did not consider it an experience, but the absence of an experience.

Believing in God is a very intense inner struggle of mine. It's something I worry about a lot, but which I don't have the answer to.

My principal anguish, and the wellspring of all my joys and sorrows, has been the incessant merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.

I think about God, yes, and I wonder if there is a God. And if there is a God, will God please help me through my hard trips.

I began asking, 'How can we know Christianity is true?' Sadly, none of the adults in my life offered an answer. Eventually I decided Christianity must not have any answers, and I became an agnostic.

Lord I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

Faith is tossed about by various doubts, so that the minds of the godly are rarely at peace.

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.

From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.

It seems to me that doubt is worse than trial. I had sooner suffer any affliction than be left to question the gospel or my own interest in it.

It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.

I live with that contradiction daily. It is a constant struggle. I struggle very deeply. I don't think I've said this to anyone, but I've wondered if I just want to give up this world and live in the Congo and just be there. But I don't think that's what they need from me.

These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.

I am exhausted by trying to get along with the Lord.

My faith is a wounded faith, but my life is not without faith. I didn't divorce God, but I'm quarrelling and arguing and questioning, it's a wounded faith.

Fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step.

Ever at Thy glowing altar Must my heart grow sick and falter, Wishing He I served were black.

I found it hard work now to pray to God, because despair was swallowing me up

Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

I've always believed in God. I'm just not so sure he believes in me.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.