"Music at its best...is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us--beyond language--to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial
heights of our silence. "
— Cornel West (The Cornel West Reader)

"You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people."
— Cornel West

"The country is in deep trouble. We've forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. We need the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, and just hoping to land on something. But that's the struggle. To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word."
— Cornel West

"Hope and optimism are different. Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there's enough evidence out there to believe things are gonna be better, much more rational, deeply secular, whereas hope looks at the evidence and says, "It doesn't look good at all. Doesn't look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever." That's hope. I'm a prisoner of hope, though. Gonna die a prisoner of hope."
— Cornell West

"To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away."
— Cornel West

"Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope."
— Cornel West

"If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody. And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convince them to join. It is when the church gives itself away in radical acts of service and compassion, expecting nothing in return, that the way of Jesus is most vividly put on display. To do this, the church must stop thinking about everybody primarily in categories of in or out, saved or not, believer or nonbeliever. Besides the fact that these terms are offensive to those who are the "un" and "non", they work against Jesus' teachings about how we are to treat each other. Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor, and our neighbor can be anybody. We are all created in the image of God, and we are all sacred, valuable creations of God. Everybody matters. To treat people differently based on who believes what is to fail to respect the image of God in everyone. As the book of James says, "God shows no favoritism." So we don't either."
— Rob Bell

"Why blame the dark for being dark? It is far more helpful to ask why the light isn’t as bright as it could be."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"God has spoken, and everything else is commentary."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"What we do comes out of who we believe we are."
— Rob Bell (Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality And Spirituality)

"Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"Freedom is not having everything we crave, it's being able to go without the things we crave and being OK with it. "
— Rob Bell

"Love Wins"
— Rob Bell

"The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God."
— Rob Bell

"It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless. "
— Donald Miller

"Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things"
— Donald Miller

""I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me""
— Donald Miller

"Imagine, a Being with a mind as great as God's, with feet like trees and a voice like rushing wind, telling you that you are His cherished creation."
— Donald Miller

" I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery, save God's own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me.
I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding you love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again.
God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic."
— Donald Miller

"I'll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time...

It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?"
— Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road)

"I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime. "
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"Dying for something is easy because it is associated with glory. Living for something is the hard thing. Living for something extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"I do not believe a person can take two issues from Scripture, those being abortion and gay marriage, and adhere to them as sins, then neglect much of the rest and call himself a fundamentalist or even a conservative. The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he takes what he wants from Scripture and ignores the rest."
— Donald Miller (Searching for God Knows What)

"When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
— Anne Lamott

"Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past."
— Anne Lamott

"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

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"Laughter is carbonated holiness."
— Anne Lamott

"Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere."
— Anne Lamott (Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"...music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way."
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells."
— Dr. Seuss

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

"Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope."
— Dr. Seuss