Ash > Ash's Quotes

“You are called into the community of faith; the call was not meant for you alone. You carry your cross, you struggle, and you pray in the community of faith, the community of those who are called.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible

“Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring.”
― Bram Stoker

“After doing this work or the past twelve years and watching scarcity ride roughshod over our families, organizations, and communities, I'd say the one thing we have in common is that we're sick of feeling afraid. we want to dare greatly. We're tired of the national conversation centering on "What should we fear" and "Who should we blame?" We all want to be brave.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“We risk missing out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“A print book is really a kind of tree zombie.”
― Scott Sigler

“We can be whoever we want to be. We can make a new future now. If we make mistakes, at least those mistakes will be ours.”
― Scott Sigler, Alive

“But is that what life is like for everyone? Can a person truly make a life of their own, or can they only continue the culture into which they are born?”
― Scott Sigler, Alone

“Sometimes courage is carried by a roar—sometimes it is hidden within a wavering voice.”
― Scott Sigler, Alone

“In a life where waking hours are draped in the costume of horrid nightmare, where reality has suddenly become questionable, it's easy to be scared by dreams.”
― Scott Sigler, Infected

“Life wasn't about deserving anything. It was about earning everything.”
― Scott Sigler, The All-Pro

“A pastor should never complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“I feel the darkness near me; I feel the light shining. And more keenly I feel the contrast between the two.”
― Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

“With the failure of these many efforts, science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate. After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the inevitable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort could not prove to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

“Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything - though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth. Those I don’t have, but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like “angle of repose”? I suppose you replied, “By living with an engineer.” But you were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life. It is the angle I am aiming for myself, and I don’t mean the rigid angle at which I rest in this chair. I wonder if you ever reached it. There was a time up there in Idaho when everything was wrong; your husband’s career, your marriage, your sense of yourself, your confidence, all came unglued together. Did you come down out of that into some restful 30° angle and live happily ever after?”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“The longer she lived in San Viejo, the more she appreciated the kind of things that went with living. Like having a window open when you slept, and grass, and tortillas. Being happy when people came to visit, and being happy when they left. The way certain things felt wonderful when you held them in your hands: a book, an ax, a baby, a beer, a big-ass pile of M&M’s.”
― Michael Poore, Reincarnation Blues

“It’s dangerous applying hindsight to something as complex as why someone wrote a poem, because the temptation is to try and make it make sense. We can apply reason, but what we can’t do is apply the storms and variations that govern a human mind moment to moment.”
― Michael Poore, Reincarnation Blues

“He was, perhaps, the crappiest meditator in the world. But he noticed this, accepted it, and let it humble him. Humility was one of the things that made him a wise man.”
― Michael Poore, Reincarnation Blues

“It was yesterday, or it was a thousand years ago. There wasn’t really a difference. Time was a swamp inside a giant washing machine.”
― Michael Poore, Reincarnation Blues

“There was this one idea going out to all the people on all the planets that maybe you couldn’t get people to stop being predators, but you could get them to stop being prey.”
― Michael Poore, Reincarnation Blues

“God, he thought, when you loved someone, every day was Opposite Day. Being with them made you feel weak and also strong. They made you want to laugh and cry. Get dressed up and get undressed. You wanted to keep them forever and eat them like a bucket of cheese fries.”
― Michael Poore, Reincarnation Blues

“Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.”
― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black

“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Stories teach us in ways we can remember. They teach us that each woman responds to birth in her unique way and how very wide-ranging that way can be. Sometimes they teach us about silly practices once widely held that were finally discarded. They teach us the occasional difference between accepted medical knowledge and the real bodily experiences that women have - including those that are never reported in medical textbooks nor admitted as possibilities in the medical world. They also demonstrate the mind/body connection in a way that medical studies cannot. Birth stories told by women who were active participants in giving birth often express a good deal of practical wisdom, inspiration, and information for other women. Positive stories shared by women who have had wonderful childbirth experiences are an irreplaceable way to transmit knowledge of a woman's true capacities in pregnancy and birth.”
― Ina May Gaskin, Ina May's Guide to Childbirth

“Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Complete Verse