L. Maristatter > L.'s Quotes

“I expect that someday you’ll have to deal with a little girl just as defiant as you were. But you’ll be glad she defies you, in spite of your frustrations, because you’ll know she has the courage to take on the world if she ever has to.”
― Catherine Jones Payne, Breakwater

“For a community that believed in the existence of sin, conservative evangelicals were curiously nonchalant about the dangers of unchecked power when that power was placed in the hands of a patriarch.”
― Kristin Kobes Du Mez

“In a world that didn’t accept the word of a woman as a valid witness, Jesus chose women as witnesses for his resurrection. In a world that gave husbands power over the very lives of their wives, Paul told husbands to do the opposite—to give up their lives for their wives. In a world that saw women as biologically deformed men, monstrous even, Paul declared that men were just like women in Christ.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Christians that oppression is godly. Their God ordained some people, simply because of their sex or skin color (or both), as belonging under the power of other people.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“I would rather die than hate.”
― Catherine Jones Payne, Breakwater

“When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”
― Sarah Kendzior

“Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.”
― Rich Mullins

“We were given the Scriptures to humble us into realizing that God is right, and the rest of us are just guessing.”
― Rich Mullins

“Don’t you get it? Nobody belongs.” She leaned toward me, her green eyes thoughtful now, her fingers pulling at the hem of her nightshirt. “We like to think we do. We set ourselves up in families and communities and clubs and castes, and we think that’s going to make us feel less lonely. But it doesn’t. Because nobody on this earth is going to truly understand you. You’ll never belong anywhere. The only person you belong to is God. And the only place you will belong is heaven. And until you realize that, Meryn, you won’t be happy anywhere.”
― L Maristatter

“Don’t you get it? Nobody belongs.” She leaned toward me, her green eyes thoughtful now, her fingers pulling at the hem of her nightshirt. “We like to think we do. We set ourselves up in families and communities and clubs and castes, and we think that’s going to make us feel less lonely. But it doesn’t. Because nobody on this earth is going to truly understand you. You’ll never belong anywhere. The only person you belong to is God. And the only place you will belong is heaven. And until you realize that, Meryn, you won’t be happy anywhere.”
― L. Maristatter, Tiny Tin House

“[The Bible] says a lot of things in there! Proof-texting is a very, very dangerous thing. I think if we were given the scriptures it was not so that we could prove that we are right about everything. If we were given the scriptures it was to humble us into realizing that God is right and the rest of us are just guessing.”
― Rich Mullins

“I want to be outside with the misfits, with the rebels, the dreamers, second-chance givers, the radical grace lavishers, the ones with arms wide open, the courageously vulnerable, and among even—or maybe especially—the ones rejected by the Table as not worthy enough or right enough.”
― Sarah Bessey, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women

“I knew the problem wasn’t a lack of women leading in church history. The problem was simply that women’s leadership has been forgotten, because women’s stories throughout history have been covered up, neglected, or retold to recast women as less significant than they really were.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Patriarchy walks with structural racism and systemic oppression, and it has done so consistently throughout history.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Synchronicities, those times when an outer event resonates mysteriously and powerfully with what's happening inside, are more numerous during great shifts and upheavals. If we pay attention, if we approach them as symbolic and revelatory, they will often illuminate a way for us.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

“If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors. If we were to abuse our pets, the Humane Society would come to take us away. But there is no Creativity Patrol or Soul Police to intervene if we insist on starving our own souls.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

“. . . the idea of existing beyond the patriarchal institution of faith, of withdrawing our external projection of God onto the church is almost unfathomable. . . . We think there's nothing beyond the edge. No real spirituality, no salvation, no community, no divine substance. We cannot see that the voyage will lead us to whole new continents of depth and meaning. That if we keep going, we might even come full circle, but with a a whole new consciousness.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

“We have rendered ourselves independent, outside its (the church's) control. We have stepped out onto our own path. For some reason this scares people senseless. It terrified me just pondering it. Women grow afraid at this moment because it means giving up a world where everything is neat and safe. In that world we feel secure, taken care of; we know where we're going. Then we wake up and find the old way doesn't work., that it no longer fits our identity, that by clinging to it, we're cutting ourselves off from something profound. But we cling anyway because it's all we've got. We call our desire for security loyalty. We yearn for the something we've lost as women, but it's so unknown, so unbearably unknown. And then one day it all comes down to this: Can we trust ourselves, our inmost selves, our feminine wisdom?”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

“The farther you go...the harder it is to return. The world has many edges and it's easy to fall off.”
― Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival

“The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.”
― Carl Hiaasen

“I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

“We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.”
― Hildegard of Bingen

“For eternity is called the “Father,” the Word is called the “Son,” and the breath that binds both of them together is called the “Holy Spirit.”
― Hildegard of Bingen, Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Divine Works: With Letters and Songs

“If he truly had understood what that meant—that time runs out—he would have done it all so differently. Maybe you can’t understand until you’re the one standing on the brink. Maybe we’re not meant to. Maybe it’s some biological trick designed to keep us safe from the saber-toothed tiger, only now it keeps us building big cities and worrying about deadlines. Maybe we’re not supposed to get that it will all be gone, we will all be gone—until it’s too late to do anything about it. If life’s a joke and death’s the punch line, in any good setup, you never see it coming. Because if we did understand, we would spend it all in the sun with the grass between our toes. What else was the point? We’re here, then we’re not. And before that and after that, the mountains stay put and the waves keep crashing and the storms come and go and none of any of that is aware that for a brief, fleeting moment, we were here too. We were a part of it too. It’s a relief to know you don’t matter, Steve realized. And understanding that brought him the first moment of peace he’d known since Claire had passed. Surely she must have seen that too. After all, she’d walked ahead; he was the one just catching up. None of it, none of us, matter. And once you see it, once you get it, once you’re free from the false belief that you think you have time, you can just enjoy it for what it is. And it is all so, so beautiful.”
― T.J. Newman, Worst Case Scenario

“But it’s a paradox. Because what is the whole without the individual? If we do not care for the life of one person, how do the lives of millions have meaning?”
― T.J. Newman, Worst Case Scenario