"If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much."
— Mark Twain

"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

"Even if I say
It'll be alright
Still I hear you say
You want to end your life
And again we try
To just stay alive
Maybe we'll turn it around
'Cause it's not too late
It's never too late"
— Three Days Grace

"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

"When life doesn't meet your expectations, it was important to take it with grace."
— Patricia Briggs (When Demons Walk)

"As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society."
— Anne Lamott

"And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.

2Corinthians 9:8"
— Paul of Tarsus

"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)

"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)

"Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"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)

""...I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central cor to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints -to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony...""
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"Butterflies are self propelled flowers. "
— R.H. Heinlein

"I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are, but does not leave us where it found us. "
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"Extraordinary afflictions are not always the punishment of extraordinary sins, but sometimes the trial of extraordinary graces."
— Matthew Henry (Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume)

"When Catherine told me about this (tragedy nearby), I could only say, shocked, "Dear God, that family needs grace."
She replied firmly, "That family needs casseroles," and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this _is_ grace."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Our worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God's grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God's grace."
— Jerry Bridges

"She [the Virgin Mary] was normal. She had already had other children. The Bible tells us that Jesus had two brothers. Virginity, as it relates to Jesus, is based on a different thing: Mary initiated a new generation of grace. A new era began. She is the cosmic bride, Earth, which opens to the heavens and allows itself to be fertilized."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us. "
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be."
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"Men will allow God to be everywhere but on his throne. They will allow him to be in his workshop to fashion worlds and make stars. They will allow Him to be in His almonry to dispense His alms and bestow his bounties. they will allow Him to sustain the earth and bear up the pillars thereof, or light the lamps of heaven, or rule the waves of the ever-moving ocean; but when God ascends Hes throne, His creatures then gnash their teeth. And we proclaim an enthroned God, and His right to do as He wills with His own, to dispose of His creatures as He thinks well, without consulting them in the matter; then it is that we are hissed and execrated, and then it is that men turn a deaf ear to us, for God on His throne is not the God they love. But it is God upon the throne that we love to preach. It is God upon His throne whom we trust."
— Charles Spurgeon

"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"Grace is the power that God gives to do what God says."
— Mike Ellis

"'Cause it's not too late
It's never too late"
— Three Days Grace

""Every time we fix something that broken, whether it's a car engine or a broken heart, that an act of magic. And what makes it magic is that we choose to create or help, just as we can choose to harm." "
— Charles de Lint

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

""I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am." "
— John Newton

"You are really and truly and completely free. There is no kicker. There is no if, and, or but. You are free. You can do it right or wrong. You can obey or disobey. You can run from Christ or run to Christ. You can choose to become a faithful Christian or an unfaithful Christian. You can cry, cuss, and spit, or laugh, sing, and dance. You can read a novel or the Bible. You can watch television or pray. You're free...really free."
— Steve Brown (A Scandalous Freedom: The Radical Nature of the Gospel)

"His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile."
— Margaret Atwood

"We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"It is not that we keep His commandments first and that then He loves but that He loves us and then we keep His commandments. This is that grace which is revealed to the humble but hidden from the proud."
— Augustine of Hippo

"Holiness is the strength of the soul. It comes by faith and through obedience to God's laws and ordinances. God then purifies the heart by faith, and the heart becomes purged from that which is profane and unworthy. When holiness is achieved by conforming to God's will, one knows intuitively that which is wrong and that which is right before the Lord. Holiness speaks when there is silence, encouraging that which is good or reproving that which is wrong. "
— James E Faust

"And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.
(Psalm 50:15)"
— God

"Aeschylus writes, "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grade of God.""
— Madeleine L'Engle (Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art)

"As fallible humans, we usually slip too far over one edge or the other - all wrath and judgment or all grace and love."
— Eric Wilson (A Shred of Truth)

"Not being changed by prayer is sort of life standing in the middle of a spring rain without getting wet. It's hard to stand in the center of God's acceptance and love without getting it all over you."
— Steve Brown (Approaching God: Accepting the Invitation to Stand in the Presence of God)

"Were God to show grace to all of Adam's descendants, men would at once conclude that He was righteously compelled to take them to heaven as meet compensation for allowing the human race to fall into sin. But the great God in under no obligation to any of his creatures, least of all to those who are rebels against him."
— Arthur W. Pink (The Attributes of God)

"Grace is a provision for men who are so fallen that they cannot lift the axe of justice, so corrupt that they cannot change their own natures, so averse to God that they cannot turn to Him, so blind that they cannot see Him, so deaf that they cannot hear Him, and so dead that He Himself must open their graves and lift them into resurrection."
— G. S. Bishop

"Virtue and genuine graces in themselves speak what no words can utter."
— William Shakespeare

"He, who thought it necessary to maintain himself in her good graces, strove to console her under her disappointment by committing a little violence upon truth."
— Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk)

"Father son oily ghost amen."
— Ginnetta Correli

"No more free steps to heaven."
— David Bowie

"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.
The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass."
— Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace)

"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass."
— Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace)