brettworks

“The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing” (16).

“There’s no such thing as dead time when everything is alive with possibility” (24).

“It’s never possibility that’s not present; only me” (27).

“When one keeps quiet, the situation becomes clear” (62).

“Leisure is where things happen to you” (81).

“Lifelong commitments are too difficult in the age of short attention spans; many—I’m too perfect an example—love to partake of a few days of absolute clarity and calm but shy away from giving ourselves up to the all-consuming hard work of a lifetime of surrender and obedience” (185).

“The Church had wanted to ban harmonies in the sixteenth century, he explains, because they can blur words that are designed to be holy. But Palestrina found a way to layer sounds so that many voices could be heard at once, yet not a syllable lost” (179).

“To find something you can’t doubt, I realize, may be the closest that some of us need to get to faith” (215).

Pico Iyer, Aflame (2025)