Key Julia > Key's Quotes

“Peace is not the absence of trouble, but the presence of Christ.”
― Sheila Walsh

“The organist was almost at the end of the anthem’s long introduction, and as the crescendo increases the cathedral began to glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building was vibrating in anticipation of the sweeping sword of sound from the Choir.

The note exploded in our midst, and at that moment I knew our creator had touched not only me but all of us, just as Harriet had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form continually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally completed, every article of the created process, seen or unseen, kept or discarded, broken or mended – EVERYTHING was justified, glorified and redeemed.”
― Susan Howatch

“There is nothing more powerful, more radical, more transformational than love. No other substance or force. And do not be deceived, for it is all of these things, and then far more than that. It can't be circumscribed by our desires or dictated by the whim of our moods. Not the Great Love of the Universe, as I like to call it. Not the Love that set everything in motion, keeps it in motion, which moves through all things and yet bulldozes nothing, not even our will. Try it. Just try it and you'll see. If you love that Great Love first, because It loved you first, and then love yourself as you have been loved, and love others from that love...WOW! BAM! Life without that kind of faith-that's death. Therein lies the great metaphor...Life without faith IS death. For life, as it was intended to be, is love. Start loving and you'll really start living. There is no other force in the universe comparable to that.”
― Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

“He quickened his stride: 'The truth is in the paradox, Miss Drake. Anything not done in submission to God, anything not done to the glory of God, is doomed to failure, frailty, and futility. This is the unholy trinity we humans fear most. And we should, for we entertain it all the time at the pain and expense of not knowing the real one.”
― Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

“...just who is your master? For we all have one. No individual, by the very state of existence, can avoid life as a form of servitude; it only remains for us to decide, deny, or remain oblivious to, whom or what we serve.”
― Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

“To that point I had not realized that in doing something I love, and at which at times I may even excel, I felt something I could only define as akin to an electric volt deep in my core. From where did this power come? Was it the presence--extension or workings or shadow--of something else in me? Or was it something else encouraging me to love through what I love?”
― Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

“That is the bizarre thing about the good news: who knows how you will really hear it one day, but once you have heard it, I mean really HEARD it, you can never UNHEAR it. Once you have read it, or spoken it, or thought it, even if it irritates you, even if you hate hearing it or cannot find it feasible, or try to dismiss it, you cannot UNREAD it, or UNSPEAK it, or UNTHINK it.
It is like a great big elephant in a tiny room. Its obvious presence begins to squeeze out everything else, including your own little measly self. Some accept it easily, some accept it quickly, and some are struck with the mystical reality of it right away. These people have no trouble bringing the unseen into the realm of the seen. But others of us fight the elephant; we push back on it, we try to ignore it, get it to leave the room, or attempt to leave the room ourselves. But it does not help. The trunk keeps curling around the doorknob. The hook is there. It may snooze or loom or rise and recede, but regardless of the time passed or the vanity endured, the idea keeps coming back, like a cosmic boomerang you just cannot throw away. I did not realize this was part of the grace of it all-such relentless truthfulness.”
― Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

“Dr. Inchbald tried his best to comply. 'I've come to the conclusion that God is sovereign, even over science, and that I cannot pretend to fully know His ways. They really are mysterious, as the saying goes. And they are not of the mind of men, no matter how hard we try to wrap our minds about these ways. I can marvel at the intricacies of the human body, which really are pretty miraculous to behold. In fact, I don't know how one can go to medical school and not be in greater awe of a Creator than ever before.”
― Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

“Jesus wanted freedom for women too,” Regina continued, “but His notion of liberation is very different from our limited one. His teachings are for the most part genderless; they apply to everyone. What is important is that my identity doesn’t lie primarily in being a professor, or being a wife, or even in being a mother. Those things will always fall short. Entire careers get swept away at a moment’s notice at the presentation of a pink slip, a vote of the elders, an accusation of a student, a cut in the budget. Marriages face infidelities, for instance, and end up like car wrecks from which people can recover but are never again the same. Children grow up and move far away and forget to write or call—as they should.” She smiled wistfully. “The point is, if you have your identity in any of these things, it’s surefire disappointment. Anything man-made—or woman-made, for that matter—will and does fail you. Having my identity in Christ first and foremost gives me the courage—yes, the courage—to live my life boldly, purposefully, in everything I do, no matter what that is.” I”
― Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

“And there you are. In the ring. With The Terror. it’s just tiny, feeble you, another student or two smarter than you, and your professor, far smarter than you. Oh sure, your professor civilly serves tea or sherry depending on the time of day, but The Terror remains.
Gradually, however, The Terror morphs into The Excitement as you being to lose yourself in the luxurious tendrils of a stimulating argument. Time always flies, the hour (or two or three) leaving you exhausted, happy, perturbed, and yet strangely satisfied by the end…. As a result, pursuing one’s degree at Oxford becomes for most not a matter of prerequisite for a job, or to please one’s parents, or to make minimum income bracket. Rather, the opportunity to study here seals an experience marked by intense personal growth resulting from a genuine desire to learn. A heady, hearty experience that changes you forever because it cracks you open ultimately to the humility of learning, which is where all of this wanted to take you in the first place.” 56”
― Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

“Conversion, EVERYTHING, including yourself, gets turned around. Transformed.'
'What happens if you turn FROM one, but can't fully turn TO the other?' I cried. 'Tell me, Michael, is there a word for being eternally, pathetically, insurmountably 'stuck'?' I paused, searching for the right words, the words that would convey exactly how my soul ached but could not quite leap. They were evading me...Is there a word for wanting to forget this God and Jesus and the whole mess? For wanting to forget it ALL?' I pinned him with my eyes.
'Despair,' he reminded me, draining his glass.”
― Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

“It’s hard enough to define what art is, much less ‘good art.’ I wonder if there is such a thing. Maybe there are just good responses. But I guess if a work of art makes us see something familiar in a new way or makes us feel something we ought to have felt all along or shows us our place in the world more clearly, maybe then it qualifies as ‘good.’ If it makes us better somehow, maybe that’s what gives it value.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“There is no virtue in advertising one’s sadness. But there is no wisdom in denying it either. And there is the beautiful possibility that great love can grow out of sadness if it is well-tended. Sadness can make us bitter or wise. We get to choose.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“for anything to be good, truly good, there must be love in it. I’m not even sure I know fully what that means, but the older I get, the more I believe it. There must be love for the gift itself, love for the subject being depicted or the story being told, and love for the audience. Whether the art is sculpture, farming, teaching, lawmaking, medicine, music, or raising a child, if love is not in it — at the very heart of it — it might be skillful, marketable, or popular but I doubt it is truly good. Nothing is what it’s supposed to be if love is not at the core.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Perhaps I am mistaken but, at some point, if we are wise, we must all confront our sadness, our brokenness, our disappointment. I am quite certain that your portraits help some people, in a very tender and courteous way, to ask themselves, maybe for the first time, ‘Who is that person? What do I know to be true, really true, about that face?’ . . .”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Living with sadness, accepting it, is easier than trying to pretend it isn’t there. It is another of life’s great mysteries that sadness and joy can coexist so compatibly with one another.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“His soul caught its breath at the sight, like a swimmer coming up from the depths. For that moment he could separate beauty from his grief, and celebrate, if only ambivalently, that there was still a world of goodness apart from, or bigger than, his aching loneliness.
Above and behind the aerial ballet of bird flight, the clouds began to robe themselves in color, as if the sky too, was fighting for the heart of this wounded man. The slow, subtle changes, akin to tilting a cluster of opal beneath light, in which one tint dissolves into another, hinted that the great expanse overhead was alive, a thriving nest of angels of hope.
The sheer wonderment of the moment, the wings of fifty thousand birds, and the intoxicating surplus of beauty, overwhelmed him, as though a rope that had been pulled taut that tied him to the darkness of Tita’s death had snapped and fallen powerless to the ground.
Theo’s eyes filled with tears again - weariness? Hope? Forgiveness? Surrender? - as he laid his head back and looked into the open sky above him.
A single star caught his eye.
A tiny glimmer.
Searching from horizon to horizon, he confirmed that it was the first and only star in the sky.’
‘Looking back on that moment, he realized that in the time between the quarter hour before sunset and the star of dusk, somehow…this splintered soul had begun to heal. It would happen in fits and starts. It would be a healing that would never, at least in this life, be total or final. But it was the moment when the fever broke for him.’
‘In every place that he ever lived after that, he insisted that his home be within walking distance of a river with a view to the west, and a bench…’
‘And, on many days…he would check the exact time of sunset to ensure that he would be punctual for his date with a ten-year-old girl whose laughter was a murmuration and whose memory was a single star, the brightest in all the sky.”
― Allen Levi

“His soul caught its breath at the sight, like a swimmer coming up from the depths. For that moment he could separate beauty from his grief, and celebrate, if only ambivalently, that there was still a world of goodness apart from, or bigger than, his aching loneliness.
Above and behind the aerial ballet of bird flight, the clouds began to robe themselves in color, as if the sky too, was fighting for the heart of this wounded man. The slow, subtle changes, akin to tilting a cluster of opal beneath light, in which one tint dissolves into another, hinted that the great expanse overhead was alive, a thriving nest of angels of hope.
The sheer wonderment of the moment, the wings of fifty thousand birds, and the intoxicating surplus of beauty, overwhelmed him, as though a rope that had been pulled taut that tied him to the darkness of Tita’s death had snapped and fallen powerless to the ground.
Theo’s eyes filled with tears again - weariness? Hope? Forgiveness? Surrender? - as he laid his head back and looked into the open sky above him.
A single star caught his eye.
A tiny glimmer.
Searching from horizon to horizon, he confirmed that it was the first and only star in the sky.‘Looking back on that moment, he realized that in the time between the quarter hour before sunset and the star of dusk, somehow…this splintered soul had begun to heal. It would happen in fits and starts. It would be a healing that would never, at least in this life, be total or final. But it was the moment when the fever broke for him.
In every place that he ever lived after that, he insisted that his home be within walking distance of a river with a view to the west, and a bench…
And, on many days…he would check the exact time of sunset to ensure that he would be punctual for his date with a ten-year-old girl whose laughter was a murmuration and whose memory was a single star, the brightest in all the sky.”
― Allen Levi

“It is another of life’s great mysteries that sadness and joy can coexist so compatibly with one another.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Theo could have come to us with great fanfare. He could have flaunted his importance and impressed us with his great wealth and long list of accomplishments. Instead, he came with anonymous handwritten letters and no last name. Instead, he came, as did His Lord, not to be served but to serve.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“And so, I say to you, my friends and neighbors, followers of Christ and those not, if you would honor the memory of Gamez Theophilus Zilavez, then do good, bestow kindness, strive for beauty, seek and find the river that leads to life everlasting, and draw from the fountain that never runs dry. “Like Theo did. “For heaven’s sake. “Amen.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Mr. Wordsworth, perhaps in a literature class at some point in your studies. He once wrote that the best portion of a good person’s life is ‘the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Sadness can make us bitter or wise. We get to choose.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“No, my dear. Sadness might be many things, but it is rarely stupid. The good sadness, I think, is always trying to tell us something very important.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Living with sadness, accepting it, is easier than trying to pretend it isn’t there. It is another of life’s great mysteries that sadness and joy can coexist so compatibly with one another. In fact, I wonder if, on this side of heaven, either one can be complete”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“But God, in His sublime goodness, has always sent others, mysterious others, to walk with us — prophets, preachers, friends, teachers, artists, storytellers, wives and husbands, children, songbirds and rivers, even hardship and loss — to help us see clearly. They are ones who make our hearts burn within us, who call us out of our indifference, our lethargy, our death and defeat. They call us to be fully alive, or at least more alive than we were before we met them.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Herbivores eat Brussels sprouts, carnivores eat birds, cashivores eat dollar bills, and verbivores eat words.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“have a close friend who is an eye doctor and a man of great depth. He holds firmly to the belief that the most important (and formative and effortless) thing a parent can do for a baby is to gaze into his or her face, to hold him or her close and engage the eyes. Could anything be simpler? Is anything more profound? Does anything more deeply change parent and child? I wonder if, like newborn children, we go through our entire lives looking for a face, longing for a particular gaze that calms and fills us, that loves and welcomes us, that recognizes and runs to greet us. Is that perhaps what this day, Christmas, is all about?”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Perhaps I am mistaken but, at some point, if we are wise, we must all confront our sadness, our brokenness, our disappointment.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Asher, we are masters at masking our sadness, but deep down inside, if we are honest, we know that there is an unsatisfied longing deep inside all of us. Your portraits invite people to be alone and quiet and truthful with themselves; to admit the longing and to discover the goodness in their sadness. Maybe?”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden