Ron Brackin > Ron's Quotes

“Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth.”
― Ron Brackin

“[G]reat stories communicate simple truths that reflect the poetic dimensions of the human soul. Not only do powerful characters help us understand our lives, their stories reflect our core values as human beings.”
― Kate Wright, Screenwriting is Storytelling: Creating an A-List Screenplay that Sells!

“Reading book reviews is like asking other people to chew your food for you.”
― Ron Brackin

“Choose your words carefully. The only place you can take back what you said is the Congressional Record.”
― Ron Brackin

“No one can take credit for inspiration or creativity.”
― Ron Brackin

“Re: Full Disclosure
Sharing with parents all the ways we tricked them as a child is no more amusing to them when we are in our fifties than it would have been had they caught us in the act.”
― Ron Brackin

“The massive doors of Area 51 closed behind him, echoing like iron thunder. Carl stood for a moment, inhaling the hot desert air, wondering whether to tell the world the wonders he had seen, and, if so, how. Amazing things. Other-worldly things. Also a set of car keys. And one brown sock.”
― Ron Brackin

“To hear a truth, we must first suspect that our present truth might not be. Like Alice’s White Queen, who often believed six impossible things before breakfast, I believed many things in my life, considering them to be true at any given time but suspecting that they might not be, until I met Jesus Christ. When we encounter The Truth, we know it and can only accept or reject it. Denial is not an option.”
― Ron Brackin

“Man's strongest instinct is not sex or self-preservation. it's to level the playing field.”
― Ron Brackin

“Followers of Jesus do well to spend more time engaging him than explaining him.”
― Ron Brackin

“When a friend of mine boasted about living in a gated community, I thought he meant Folsom, and I wondered whether he knew Charles Manson.”
― Ron Brackin

“There's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is popular or unpopular. What is banned in Boston may be bid on at Christie's.”
― Ron Brackin

“Complete honesty is not the same thing as full disclosure.”
― Ron Brackin

“There's no such thing as great art or poor art. Art is subjective expression. As such, it can be judged only as popular or unpopular. What is banned in Boston may one day receive a million-dollar bid at Christie's. Art has, therefore, no use for critics but frequently finds itself amused by commentators.”
― Ron Brackin

“Homeowners' Association: the means whereby people who own homes are able to transfer their rights to the neighborhood control freaks.”
― Ron Brackin

“God cautions us in Isaiah 55:9 that his ways are not ours and his thoughts are higher than our thoughts (undoubtedly one of the grander understatements).

God is warning us that he is not logical and that believing him to be logical will lead to all kinds of disappointment.

Logic has been defined as 'the science or history of the human mind, as it traces the progress of our knowledge from our first conceptions through their different combinations, and the numerous deductions that result from comparing them with one another.'

Doesn't sound much like God. Yet, we so often strain our relatively minuscule brains to conceive, combine, compare, and deduce. Then we fault God when his conclusions disagree.

The repetition of this useless exercise leads to a form of insanity which ultimately manifests in denial of the existence of such an illogical God.”
― Ron Brackin

“We were created with the ability and the inclination to admire beauty. We should, however, do our best not to fall in love with it.”
― Ron Brackin

“There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest accumulated over all the years…”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“The words 'good' and 'love' have become so trivialized in our culture--not that our definitions were so accurate to begin with--that, in times of distress or disappointment, we struggle to believe that God is either.”
― Ron Brackin

“I'd rather be frequently quoted than widely published.”
― Ron Brackin

“God clues us in to the fact that, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." In short, God is not logical. This is not to say that he is illogical, only that he is not limited by logic. Simplified, "logic" is connecting the dots. We identify the dots we consider relevant, then connect them into lines and patterns. God, on the other hand, may see that, beneath one of the dots is a stack of a trillion more dots, each of which may be combined with the others. Little wonder that our ways and meanings frequently fail to match God's ways and meanings. Great wonder that, when they don't, we tend to fault him.”
― Ron Brackin

“Forgiveness is the virtue of the courageous, the response of the forgiven, the mercy of the just.”
― Ron Brackin, Forgive Your Way to Better Health, Greater Productivity, and World Peace

“The problem with today's culture is that we have too many rights and not enough wrongs.”
― Ron Brackin

“I'm 68 years old, and somebody asked if I'm retired. I told him, "No, I'll still be writing long after I'm dead.”
― Ron Brackin

“One problem with today's culture is that we defend too many rights and ignore too many wrongs.”
― Ron Brackin

“A truce between Israel and Palestine? Imagine walking into a doctor’s office. You sit down, pick up a magazine, and begin to read. A few minutes later, a man walks in, the man who killed your wife, the man whose son you murdered. He sits down, picks up a magazine, and begins to read.

A two-state solution to the problem between Israel and Palestine? Imagine walking into a doctor’s office. You sit down, pick up a magazine, and begin to read. Next door, a man walks into the restaurant, the man who killed your wife, the man whose son you murdered. He sits down at a table, orders a meal, and begins to eat.

In either case, there is an intolerable tension that has resisted resolution by diplomacy, combat, sanctions, or segregation. Forgiveness is the only reasonable solution.”
― Ron Brackin

“One of the biggest obstacles on the path of peace, or even peaceful coexistence, between Israelis and Palestinians was placed by the international community and media when it redefined Hamas as an "organization." One result is that outsiders try to reach a solution based on the assumption that Hamas has structure and leaders. It does not. It has no "political wing" or "militant wing." Hamas is a loosely-knit band of terrorists. Its leaders are whoever has weapons, plans, and influence. Hamas is thuggish and cowardly. Those who fly the green flag are not military combatants. Nor do they represent, or care a whit, for the Palestinian people, as evidenced by their strategy of hiding in and fighting from schools, clinics, hospitals, and people's homes. After what passed for an election some Hamas terrorists were further redefined as politicians and diplomats, though they were neither politic nor diplomatic, evidenced by the fact that many "govern" from Israeli prisons. Prior to the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, Hamas had been emasculated and nearly eradicated by Yassir Arafat, who rounded up, disarmed, and imprisoned the terrorist "leaders," leaving its remaining members to return to their homes. Arafat ensured that members of Hamas had no place to hide among the Palestinian people. And that is the only way the terrorist cancer in Gaza will be excised today. In the absence of Arafat, the task falls by default to Israel, which would do better to enable the citizens of Gaza to purge themselves of Hamas and reward them for doing so than try to get rid of the bad apples by blowing up the barrel, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor.”
― Ron Brackin

“If women don't like men staring at their chests, they shouldn't write on them.”
― Ron Brackin

“A curse of being a writer is the compulsion to edit. Take the sign on my walking trail, for example. It reads, 'Watered by well water.' One of these days, no matter how hard I try to resist, I just know I'm going to paint it out to read, 'Irrigated by well water.' If you don't get this, it's because you're not a writer.”
― Ron Brackin

“The artist is the only one qualified to criticize his art, because only the artist knows what he was trying to express and how satisfied he is with the attempt.”
― Ron Brackin