Ma > Ma's Quotes

“The greatness of our God lies in the fact that he is both tough minded and tenderhearted. He has qualities both of austerity and gentleness. The Bible, always clear in stressing both attributes of God, expresses his tough mindedness in his justice and wrath and his tenderheartedness in his love and grace. God has two outstretched arms. One is strong enough to surround us with justice and one is gentle enough to embrace us with grace.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

“Things do not always happen as one plans. There are many disappointments in life. There is always the unexpected. You plan carefully, you decide on one step after another, and then...well, that is life. We are not God. So you see, one cannot afford to be weighed down by the unexpected. You will find that only determination will bring one through, sheer determination. And faith in God. Don't ever neglect your prayers....”
― Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood

“Yes, you know damned well what you should have done if you sincerely desired their surrender. You could have dropped it [the atom bomb] on one of their mountains, even in the sea, anywhere they could see what would happen if they persisted in the war, but you chose instead to drop it on peopled cities. I know you, the white mentality: Japanese, Chinese, Africans, we are all subhuman. You would drop an atom bomb on Abeokuta or any of your colonies if it suited you!”
― Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood

“Trying to express the leaf, the carvers inadvertently had expressed themselves. But it was a superior kind of self-expression, coming not from narcissism or exhibitionism, but from a union with their subject. It was unconscious, unintended: an unimportant side effect....If you want to express yourself, stop expressing yourself. Better yet, stop wanting to express yourself....Forget yourself. It will improve your work. Let the things you make proceed by their own design.”
― David Esterly, The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making

“Quite out of the blue a bizarre and compelling idea came into my head today: that we have ended up as human beings through forgetfulness, through lack of attention, and that in reality we are creatures participating in a vast, cosmic battle that has probably been going on since time immemorial and which, for all we know, may never end. All we see of it are glimmers, in blood-red moons, in fires and gales, in frozen leaves that fall in October, in the jittery flight of a butterfly, in the irregular pulse of time that can lengthen a night into infinity or come to a violent stop each day at noon. I am actually an angel or a demon sent into the turmoil of one life on a sort of mission, which is either carrying itself out without my help, or else I have totally forgotten about it. This forgetfulness is part of the war--it's the other side's weapon, and they've attacked me with it so that I'm wounded, invalided out of the game for a while. As a result, I don't know how powerful or how weak I am--I don't know anything about myself because I can't remember anything, and that's why I don't try to look for either weakness or power in myself. It's an extraordinary feeling--to imagine that somewhere deep inside, you are someone completely different from the person you always thought you were. But it didn't make me feel anxious, just relieved, finally free of a kind of weariness that used to permeate my life.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total word revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that of writing all books, writing the books of all possible authors.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“...to admit to oneself the presence within oneself of angry, aggressive feelings is essential to one's wholeness.”
― Jesse M. Trotter, Christian Wholeness: Spiritual Direction for Today

“In the strictest sense wholeness cannot be a direct objective. We approach or progress toward wholeness by participating in the conversion process. That is our clear and direct objective, participation in the conversion process. And there is something we can do about that. We can begin by embarking upon the journey inward. We can learn to pray. We can learn to pray by first being quiet before God.”
― Jesse M. Trotter, Christian Wholeness: Spiritual Direction for Today

“Happiness is an outcome, a by-product of seeking something else.”
― Jesse M. Trotter, Christian Wholeness: Spiritual Direction for Today

“Living for responsibility and love can be a great source of happiness....”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Stone Boy and Other Stories

“God is neither Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian , nor Episcopalian [nor Reformed, either]. God transcends our denominations. If you are to be true witnesses for Christ, you must come to know this....”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

“...a misunderstanding of the gospel leads to a false dichotomy [distinction]: we prioritize the spiritual and personal aspects of faith and devalue...dimensions that bind us to God's creation and to our brothers and sisters made in the image of God.”
― Ken Wytsma, The Myth of Equality: Uncovering the Roots of Injustice and Privilege

“We say that religion is a matter of mood: we must wait until the mood strikes us. And then we often wait for years —perhaps until the end of our life—until we are once again in the mood to be religious. This idea is based on a great illusion. It is alll well and good to let religion be a matter of mood, but God is not a matter of mood. He is still present even when we are not in the mood to meet with him.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is on the Cross: Reflections on Lent and Easter

“Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people — the following preparations would be essential:

1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of trouble.

2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment.

3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations.

4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easy manipulated and dominated that scattered individuals.

5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority.

6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test for loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order.

7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns.

8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“I imagine looking at the room through a stranger's eyes. Books everywhere, stacks and stacks, shelves and bookcases, stacks atop each shelf, I in the creaky chair that hasn't been reupholstered since I bought it in the early sixties. I have been its only occupant; years ago its foam molded into the shape of my posterior. The accompanying ottoman holds two stacks of books that haven't been disturbed in years, except for semiweekly dusting.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“Buying music was almost my sole expense but not, of course, my sole luxury. I have far more books than I have albums, far more....”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“I was a voracious reader, but after Hannah's death I grew insatiable. Books became my milk and honey. I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like 'Books are the air I breathe,' or, worse, 'Life is meaningless without literature,' all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children's picture book.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“I jump out of my chair -- well, what would be considered a jump at my age. My knee buckles, almost sending me sprawling across the carpet. I steady myself at the reading room's door. My hand leans across the jamb and I find myself face-to-face with the unframed circular mirror. I avert my eyes, of course, but I make a decision to clean it before the day is done, at least dust it off.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“Children must practice disappointment when they are young, so that when they are grown, it will not go so hard with them.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed

“Secrets, she agreed. The definition of personality, I went on, reminding her that Odysseus wept when he heard the poet sing of his great deeds abroad because, once sung, they were no longer his alone. They belonged to anyone who heard the song.”
― Just Ward, An Unfinished Season

“We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Life was full of these intuitions that one must get smaller, go further in. The golden box was so deeply within that it was hard to find, yet it contained an entire country and was, she supposed, the only luggage one could take with one if there was anywhere to go beyond death.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“I think that this sudden growth of transport facilities, especially in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Manchoukuo, China, countries I have visited, discloses the background of our time: fear of too mighty neighbors.”
― Ella K. Maillart, The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939

“But I have often notices that Westerners have an inborn tendency to minimize or ridicule whatever Persians do--not because it is badly done, but simply because they are exasperated by the pride of the Persian who boasts that what he has done is "the best in the world." They do not see that among Asiatics this attitude is the inevitable reaction to the condescension with which Westerners brought their mechanical progress to the East as if it were a revealed religion capable of healing all ills.”
― Ella K. Maillart, The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939

“The Nazis would not have turned their backs on the ideas of freedom and Christian love which alone can help man get along, if these ideas had not put up such a miserable show during the last centuries.”
― Ella K. Maillart, The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939

“But the intensity of my desire to help her had spoilt my intention. That intensity had brought with it a kind of effort that had tired me. Had goodness been part of me I should have helped her with detachment, quite simply because I could not do otherwise—as the sun shines, or as one give a hand to a tumbling child; I should not have vitiated the movement by thinking: "I must succeed I have to succeed!”
― Ella K. Maillart, The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939

“Five days after the food was Easter Sunday. The only church that had not been flooded in the neighborhood invited everyone to services, come as you are. Mom decreed we were going to church. "Church!?" I thought. What in the world was she thinking? We had been cleaning up flood mud for three days with no water to clean ourselves up. Mom insisted. She said that Calvary Baptist was going to allow women into the sanctuary in pants and that was something we were not going to miss. (In 1977 this was earthshattering for sure.) I guess we would take a stand for women's equality!”
― Donna L. Burgraff, Appalachian Magazine's Mountain Voice: 2017: A Collection of Memories, Histories, and Tall Tales of Appalachia

“Exile seems the fate of independent minds, for nationalism invariably becomes perverted to a tyranny.”
― Zulfikar Ghose, Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers

“...liberation was found in how you lived your daily life and not something you hoped for in the future. If you couldn't experience liberation in the present moment, you would never experience it.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Hermitage Among the Clouds: An Historical Novel of Fourteenth Century Vietnam

“The unbusied heart is free to do all it wants.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Hermitage Among the Clouds: An Historical Novel of Fourteenth Century Vietnam