"There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come."
— Jane Kenyon (Collected Poems)

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. "
— Annie Dillard

"You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."
— Graham Greene

"Mirrors that hide nothing hurt me. But this is the hurt of purging and precious renewal - and these are the mirrors of dangerous grace."
— Walter Wangerin Jr.

"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

"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."
— Gustave Flaubert

"We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature."
— Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage)

"Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe - these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted."
— Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage)

"It is a good rule . . . to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books."
— C.S. Lewis

"I seemed to hear God saying, "Put down your gun and we'll talk."
— C.S. Lewis

"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)

"Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit."
— Marcel Proust

"A great benefit of Sabbath keeping is that we learn to let God take care of us — not by becoming passive and lazy, but in the freedom of giving up our feeble attempts to be God in our own lives."
— Marva J. Dawn (Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Feasting)

"The longer I pursue a double life, seeking justice in my day job and beauty in reading and writing, the more I’m convinced that justice without joy is as heartless as bureaucracy, and that beauty hoarded for the beautiful is an oppressor’s dream."
— Laura Bramon Good

"Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave - now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth."
— Leif Enger (Peace Like a River)

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."
— Oscar Wilde

"Listening to Dad's guitar, halting yet lovely in the search for phrasing, I thought: Fair is whatever God wants to do."
— Leif Enger

"There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention."
— Flannery O'Connor

"A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color."
— Annie Dillard

"He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing."
— Annie Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk, Expeditions and Encounters)

"'Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.'"
— Frederick Buechner (Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith)

"If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in."
— Frederick Buechner (Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized)

"The thought that I must, that I ought to, write, never leaves me for an instant."
— Tchekov

"In reading we must become creators."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
— Flannery O'Connor

"It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance - for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light .... Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? .... Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

"The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out."
— Anne Lamott

"I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Call it a diary--it is less imposing than a journal, which sounds like an end in itself. I steer clear of the word journal--and its spawn, the verb to journal, as in, 'I have been journaling all my life.' If I were to call my notebook a journal I would probably write with the notion that it be published someday, preferably posthumously, and people would marvel. This would make me self-conscious. I would be trying to perfect each sentence before its time. I prefer notes; if I clean it up too fast I lose the spark. Everything goes in: grocery lists, things to do (so I can scratch them off) random observations, knitting patterns, recipes, overheard dialogue, everything. A diary isn't sacred. Think of it as the written equivalent to singing in the shower. I don't care what I'm writing and I don't pay attention to language.. A friend wanted to know what I was working on; she was reading the paper and I was writing in my diary. We were having coffee at Bread Alone.
'Nothing,' I said.
'It can't be nothing,' she said, assuming perhaps that writers were always doing something interesting. She leaned over and read, 'It is taking a long time to get my sandwich.'
Case closed."
— Abigail Thomas

"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

"Reality is what we notice on the surface – what we feel or see, what superficial perspectives we might gain, for example, from television's evening news. Truth is much larger. It encompasses everything that genuinely is going on. The reality might be that our world looks totally messed up, that war and economic chaos seem to control the globe. But the truth is much deeper – that Jesus Christ is still (since His ascension) Lord of the cosmos, and the Holy Spirit is empowering many people to work for peacemaking and justice building as part of the Trinity's purpose to bring the universe to its ultimate wholeness. The reality might be that you do not feel God, but the truth is that God is always present with you, perpetually forgiving you, and unceasingly caring for you with extravagant grace and abundant mercy. Not only that, but the very process of dealing with our lack of feelings and our resultant doubts about God is one of the ways by which our trust in the Trinity is deepened."
— Marva J. Dawn (Being Well When We're Ill: Wholeness and Hope in Spite of Infirmity)

"Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split the frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you that that is beautiful, and a part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough."
— Paul Harding (Tinkers)

"Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny."
— C.S. Lewis

"We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
— G.K. Chesterton

"It is doubtful that God can use a man greatly until He hurts him deeply."
— A.W. Tozer (Pursuit of God)