More on: Essays

I was trying to pray. How I yearned to pray! But I was both fascinated and repelled by this man’s presence.

Over their caravan, a banner emblazoned with the words of their father: That we may live and not die.

It had been four months since we’d run out of money. Somehow, we were still afloat.

In no world was there enough medication, technology, or manpower to keep everyone alive.

Even though Aylon painted it in 1978, there were still oil drops around the outside of the frame. The painting appeared to drip.

Many have lamented that we don’t have a Lewis to help us think through these questions (or a Chesterton or a Tolkien to help him), but in my estimation Sally Rooney comes pretty close.

Like a person caught in quicksand, the Schrader male antihero struggles toward salvation only to be driven deeper into the thing that’s swallowing him whole.

The insides of our mothers’ bodies are the only places that are most certainly past. From then on, from there on, every room is just an echo of that first, red room.

Like Mackey, [Howe] is forced to interpret the historical recurrence of evil as cruelly fated; human beings are the unwitting playthings of what she calls, in Manimal Woe, “the mystery of repetition.”