Jean's quotes

(showing 1-29 of 29)

"If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change."
— Kathleen Norris

tags: grace, wisdom
20 people liked it

"Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine."
— Kathleen Norris

tags: inspirational, prayer
33 people liked it

"The Christian religion asks us to put our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God Who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and Who desires to be present to us in our ordinary circumstances."
— Kathleen Norris

tags: christianity, wisdom
5 people liked it

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: books, children, difficult, grown-ups, write, writers, writing
3,070 people liked it

"Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: god, joy
239 people liked it

"Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.'"
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: art, incarnation
19 people liked it

"There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: incarnation, sacred
12 people liked it

"If God were our one and only desire we would not be so easily upset when our opinions do not find outside acceptance."
— Thomas à Kempis (The Imitation of Christ)

tags: acceptance, christ, christian, opinions
7 people liked it

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: christianity, religion, sun
2,610 people liked it

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: children-s, entertainment, stories
910 people liked it

"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: education
127 people liked it

"Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: miracles
129 people liked it

"Romance is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of eucatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world poignant as grief."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

13 people liked it

"I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor)

27 people liked it

"The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development."
— Flannery O'Connor

tags: religion
20 people liked it

"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

tags: grace, writing
9 people liked it

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor)

12 people liked it

"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."
— Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories)

7 people liked it

"When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

tags: wisdom
5 people liked it

"I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us."
— Anne Lamott

tags: grace, inspirational
80 people liked it

"Grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors."
— William P. Young (The Shack)

tags: grace, life, love
9 people liked it

" . . . there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

tags: grace
3 people liked it

""I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.""
— Anne Lamott (Grace [Eventually]: Thoughts on Faith)

tags: grace
3 people liked it

"Be a good listener in the special way a story requires: note the manner of presentation; the development of plot, character; the addition of new dramatic sequences; the emphasis accorded to one figure or another in the recital; and the degree of enthusiam, of coherence, the narrator gives to his or her account."
— Robert Coles (The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination)

tags: character, plot, story
3 people liked it

"Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference."
— Robert Coles (The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination)

tags: meaning, story, value
2 people liked it

"When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception."
— Zadie Smith

tags: elimination, perfection, truth, writing, zadiesmith
5 people liked it

"The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life."
— Zadie Smith

4 people liked it

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