"He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger."
— Elizabeth Gaskell (Wives and Daughters)

"Put that that thing away...you can't play with it in public.."
— Ac

"If I dropped a tear upon your hand, may it wither it up! If I spoke a gentle word in your hearing, may it deafen you! If I touched you with my lips, may the touch be poison to you! A curse upon this roof that gave me shelter! Sorrow and shame upon your head! Ruin upon all belonging to you!""
— Charles Dickens

"Ironically, it was the father's blessing that actually "financed" the prodigal son's trip away from the Father's face! and it was the son's new revelation of his poverty of heart that propelled him back into his Father's arms. Sometimes we use the very blessings that God gives us to finance our journey away from the centrality of Christ. It's very important that we return back to ground zero, to the ultimate eternal goal of abiding with the Father's in intimate communion. (pg. 243)"
— Tommy Tenney (The God Chasers: My Soul Follows Hard after Thee)

"We don't use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something o the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set – or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a statue. If he is clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very like man indeed. But, of course, it is not a ream man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.

Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Son's of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God."
— C.S. Lewis

"A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself"
— Orson Scott Card

""I'll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.""
— Denis Johnson

"Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you."
— Gregory Maguire (Son of a Witch: A Novel)

"Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?"
— Richard Wright

"You move because you are built for movement, because your heartbeat and respiration are involuntary. Though you feel the part of you that is always dying, the rest moves forward, squeezed between destiny and choice"
— Cai Emmons (His Mother's Son)

"At least Roland had understood. 'One day you'll discover that the opinions of worthless people are worthless,' he had murmured to Bink. 'You have to do it your own way. I comprehend that, and wish you well--on your own' (20)."
— Piers Anthony (A Spell for Chameleon)

"Why should not this cold white world rise up as a beautiful dream in which he could walk and be at home, in which it would be easy to tell what to do and what not to do? If only someone had gone before and lived or suffered or died - made it so that it could be understood! It was too stark, not redeemed, not made real with the reality that was the warm blood of life. He felt that there was something missing, some road which, if he had once found it, would have led him to a sure and quiet knowledge."
— Richard Wright