Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
Life is easier when you can write off others as monsters, demon, as horrible threats that must be hated and feared the thing is you can't do that without becoming them, just a little.
Every time we open the Bible, let's stop and pray, whether for fifteen seconds or fifteen minutes, asking the Spirit to teach us. When I read the Bible, I want God to talk to my soul.
Yet only the atrocities of the conquered are referred to as criminal acts; those of the conqueror are justified as necessary, heroic, and even worse, as the fulfillment of God's will.
Americans are incredibly inpatient. Someone once said that the shortest period of time in America is the time between when the light turns green and when you hear the first horn honk.
If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.
Leaders must learn to discipline their disappointments. It's not what happens to us, it is what we choose to do about what happens that makes the difference in how our lives turn out.
My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.
I sublimate different parts of my personality through my characters. Which is worrying, as some of them can be a bit nasty. I'm pleased the stuff on the page isn't inside me any more.
I grew up in a household where we didn't really talk about our feelings, and where the only reason you went to a doctor was because you'd accidentally cut off a limb with a chain saw.
The hardest thing in the world is believing someone can change. It's always easier to go along with the way things are than to admit that you might have been wrong in the first place.
I think the reason these readers come back to me is because I represent their points of view. It may not be my point of view, but that's OK. Everyone still deserves to have their say.
I think heroes are important in the lives of kids because it shows a child what to become, it shows a child what's possible; it shows a child not just by theory but by active example.
What I think is critically important is that there are lots of studies on how prayer effects people that are ill, lots of studies, and I know in my life my prayers have been answered.
The smart phone isn't a perfect device, as we all know. It forces the world into a tiny screen. It runs out of battery, bandwidth, and power. It distracts us from the world around us.
God is seeking those who hear His call to a life of worship. Those who heed are those who will walk in His presence. They will know Him intimately as He will manifest Himself to them.
What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.
God already knows what we're made of, but perhaps He wants us to learn what we're made of. I think we would all agree that we learn more from our tough times than from our easy times.
I've always had a compassion for characters in novels - the sense that they are, whatever they might think, living in a world that has a shape they don't know and can't finally alter.
For you to access your own innermost as awareness is for you to surrender form after form after form, enabling you as awareness to recede to what you first are, for you to be meaning.
I thought I'd stumbled on Sleeping Beauty and her ugly sister,' said another voice, 'waiting for the kiss of true love to wake them from their slumbers. Forgive me if I didn't oblige.
The mace prodded Will in the back again. That little habit was starting to annoy him and he was tempted to take the weapon from the sergeant major and do a little prodding of his own.
When the Christians, upon these occasions, received martyrdom, they were ornamented, and crowned with garlands of flowers; for which they, in heaven, received eternal crowns of glory.
But, though persecuting malice raged, yet the Gospel shone with resplendent brightness; and, firm as an impregnable rock, withstood the attacks of its boisterous enemies with success.
Cell phones have changed us from a nation of self-reliant pioneer types into a bunch of men standing alone in supermarkets saying, ‘Okay, I’m in the tampon aisle, but I don’t see it.'
I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?
The act of leaning in to kiss someone, or asking them, is fraught with the possibility of rejection, so the person least likely to get rejected should do the leaning in or the asking.
We have to live with ambiguity. We have to give ourselves over to it. The question is: How? How are we going to live in a universe where important questions will always go unanswered?
I'm at the eye doctor. I'm always at the eye doctor. It's like this is my profession. I am no longer a writer, I'm now an optomoligical patient. By the way, this job doesn't pay well.
Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died.
Only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn’t unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn’t want to.
Mom sobbed something into Dad's chest that I wish I hadn't heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, "I won't be a mom anymore." It gutted me pretty badly.
I mean, he was something that happened to me, you know? But before he was this minor figure in the drama of my life he was - you know, the central figure in the drama of his own life.
I'm interested in Internet cultures. I'm interested in what the teenagers who drive the Internet culture are passionate about. I follow their lead - they go to tumblr, I go to tumblr.
Dislike of another's opinions and beliefs neither justifies our own nor makes us more certain of them: and to transfer the repugnance to the person himself is a mark of a vulgar mind.
I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.
It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.
The Holy Spirit says: You are it. You are God's plan. In a thirsty world, people need to be refreshed. It is a broken world, and people need to be healed. Now get out there and do it!
He works in us and with us, not against us or without us; so that his assistance is an encouragement to the facilitating of the work, and no occasion of neglect as to the work itself.
Do we eagerly long for the coming of Christ? Or do we want him to wait while our love affair with the world runs its course? That is the question that tests the authenticity of faith.
I'm not writing for fundamentalists. I'm writing for the people who have been repelled by that kind of thinking and yet who think there might be something they haven't yet discovered.
If I were a child of Tibet or of Arabia, I suspect the path I'd walk would be the Buddhist path or the Muslim path. And I don't mind saying that I don't invalidate any of those paths.
Some people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child.
The law requires works of human achievement; the gospel requires faith in Christ's achievement. The law makes demands and bids us obey; the gospel brings promises and bids us believe.
The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.
The meaning of atonement is not to be found in our penitence evoked by the sight of Calvary, but rather in what God did when in Christ on the cross He took our place and bore our sin.
I wanted to take the power of thought and the word, along with the power of speaking and heart, and see if we could wire what was coming out of us as humans with electric instruments.
I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other's individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on this deeper level.
'Just looking at pictures' used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading.