Those who give themselves to prayer should in a special manner have always a devotion to St. Joseph; for I know not how any man can think of the Queen of the angels, during the time that she suffered so much with the Infant Jesus, without giving thanks to St. Joseph for the services he rendered them then.

I have good relationships with Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden and especially Richard Holbrooke - he is my teacher. I learned a lot of great things from him.

I was the only child born to Josephine Perry that survived. Mama had six other children before me, and all had passed very quickly and very young, all succumbing to a combination of illness and disease and the lack of strength to fight off both.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

Let us wait in patience for the Christ-child whose own life depended on the lives of Mary and Joseph. The Word of God was made flesh. He came so that we might experience the fullness of time.

I was at a pharmaceutical conference in Dallas and bored out of my head. I'd split up from my missus and went downtown and had my kids' initials done, JLD, for Joseph, Luke and Daniel. Then I got back with my wife so I had her initials added during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - after I'd waited a few years to see if the marriage would work!

The principle of plural marriage was revealed to the Mormons amid much secrecy. Dark clouds hovered over the church in the early 1840s, after rumors spread that its founder, Joseph Smith, had taken up the practice of polygamy. While denying the charge in public, by 1843 Smith had shared a revelation with his closest disciples.

I suppose I am a frustrated musician so I annoy my family by playing guitar in the house. I used to be into acoustic stuff but my son Joseph is learning drums, so now I have an electric guitar and we play Metallica. We have an amp and a PA in the garage with his drum kit.

If you want to know why the coast is such an inspirational place, ask Herman Melville, Jack London, Nordhoff and Hall, Robert Louis Stevenson or Joseph Conrad. It's a glimpse of eternity. It invites rumination, the relentless whisper of the tide against the shore.

My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters.

I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.

'Expect nothing and hope for the best' is my mantra. A drama teacher called Joseph Blatchley told me that, and it's the best advice I've had. If you keep an open mind and don't expect too much, then you won't be disappointed.

I got fitter when I did 'Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.' I wore a loincloth - that's a lot of motivation!

One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me not to rest so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?" Joseph Knect said to his Music Master "there is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend rather, you should long for perfection in yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived not taught

"No, I don't believe it," Joseph said. "From listening to my father and grandfather talk about El Shaddai, I think he's different from the Gods of Egypt. I think that none of us could ever be good enough for God. I think of Him as being so good that a human can't even enter His presence. A man would die if he did. I think God's merciful, Rashidi. I think he forgives us because he loves us, just as we forgive our children because we love them.

Whether our days trip along like the angels mounting on Jacob's ladder to heaven or grind along like the wagons that Joseph sent for Jacob, they are in each case ordered by God's mercy.

It was by faith, nothing wavering, that Joseph saw God our Eternal Father and Jesus Christ, His Son.

The old man slowly raised himself from the piano stool, fixed those cheerful blue eyes piercingly and at the same time with unimaginable friendliness upon him, and said: "Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends. There is none easier. That is a fine thing. I hope you and I shall remain friends. Perhaps you too will learn how to make fugues, Joseph.

Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph exclaimed. "If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?

Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us feel in our bones (not just know in our heads) that God is for us in all these strange turns. God is not just showing up after the trouble and cleaning it up. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far-reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ.

I have good relationships with Hillary Clinton Joseph Biden and especially Richard Holbrooke - he is my teacher. I learned a lot of great things from him.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am more so than by Eliot. Actually I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.