ryan.smith.blog

"Although few will listen to or credit this, I think we are in a lost age, in which holiness and charity have been traded for the victory and penetration of knowledge, though all the knowledge in the world has not brought us any further than where we can go without it even in the outermost halls of grace. I believe that more is to be known and apprehended from the beauty of a face than in delving, no matter how deep, simply into how things work, no matter how marvelous that may be. The greatest substance of the world is immaterial, the province of the heart, and its study cannot be forced or reasoned. Merely to touch upon the edge of things in parsing their mechanics is to forswear their fullness, for the entry to this fullness lies not in science but in art. I cannot prove this, for it cannot be proven, but I claim, assert, and have seen it." -THE PACIFIC & OTHER STORIES

"When I first came to the capital, I worked at building houses and discovered something sad and true. I learned that houses are delicate frames that hold people only tenuously, that walls and floors are made of weak pieces weakly stitched together, that they are broken apart by rain and snow, by gravity, and the movement of the earth. I learned that they go quickly in fire, and that windows shatter in a storm and doors are broken by enemies and those who are angry. I learned that there is no safety and no shelter in anything we build or do, that the safest and most sheltering place is in the open, in what we call forever." -THE VEIL OF SNOWS