R.L. > R.L.'s Quotes

“—a place where thought can take its shape as quietly in the mind as water in a pitcher...”
― Wendell Berry, Openings: Poems

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I want you, dear reader, to remember that one holy way of mending the world is to sing, to write, to paint, to weave new worlds. Because the seed of your feeble-yet-faithful work fell to the ground, died, and rose again, what Christ has done through you will call forth praise from lonesome travelers long after your name is forgotten. They will know someone lived and loved here.”
― Andrew Peterson, Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making

“When you care about someone and give them something special. Something that they treasire. That's a gift.”
― Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue

“There are people, like tigers, who have a thirst for licking blood. A man who has once experienced this power, this unlimited lordship over the body, blood, and spirit of a man just like himself, created in the same way his brother by the law of Christ; a man who has experienced this power and the full possibility of inflicting the ultimate humiliation upon another being bearing the image of God, somehow involuntarily loses control of his sensations. Tyranny is a habit; it is endowed with development, and develops finally into an illness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead

“But maybe it is about finding someone whose heart is like a mirror, whose love can make you stand the sight of yourself.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Last Tale of the Flower Bride

“I don't want you to get trapped by things you thought were there and weren't...or by someone who says they're the only one who can love you.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Last Tale of the Flower Bride

“I believe there is a dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low. This does not mean that it is ever right to cause suffering or to seek it out when it can be avoided, and serves no good, practical purpose. To value suffering in itself can be dangerous and strange, so I want to be very clear about this. It means simply that God takes the side of sufferers against those who afflict them.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Maybe there were people who lived those lives. Maybe this girl was one of them. But what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren’t chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall; but the God created from human vanity sees no difference between an eagle and a sparrow.”
― Bram Stoker

“Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best. ”
― Isak Dinesen, Babette's Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny

“Into this tragicomic conundrum, the writers who are other must nevertheless fall and rise, fall and fail again, again and again, as they confront, avoid, exploit, or elevate their own otherness, both the difference projected onto them and the alterity already entwined inside. This otherness and its history demands grief, but the challenge of the writer as an other is to expand that grief, to make it ever more capacious, rather than reduce it to a singular sorrow. Capacious grief acknowledges that the trauma of the other is neither singular nor unique, that there are others out there with whom we can share the burden. Perhaps only by expanding our grief might we be able to leave our trauma behind. And in sharing our burden—of writing, of representation, of otherness—we might transform that burden into a gift.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other