[A]t great cost I bought the first volume of the Works of St. John of the Cross and sat … and turned over the first pages, underlining places here and there with a pencil. But it turned out that it would take more than that to make me a saint: because these words I underlined, although they amazed and dazzled me with their import, were all too simple for me to understand.

They were too naked, too stripped of all duplicity and compromise for my complexity, perverted by many appetites ….

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain 📚