Michael Histand > Michael's Quotes

“The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

“He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason”
― Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

“He had learned how to assemble Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. And he had learned that poverty was blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

“And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on 'Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt' had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

“And when Elmer was about to slip out to the kitchen with her to make lemonade, Benham held him by demanding, 'What do you think of John Wesley's doctrine of perfection?'

'Oh, it's absolutely sound and proven,' admitted Elmer, wondering what the devil Mr. Wesley's doctrine of perfection might be.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

“The Reverend Elmer Gantry was reading an illustrated pink periodical devoted to prize fighters and chorus girls in his room at Elizabeth J. Schmutz Hall late of an afternoon when two large men walked in without knocking.

"Why, good evening, Brother Bains—Brother Naylor! This is a pleasant surprise. I was, uh— Did you ever see this horrible rag? About actoresses. An invention of the devil himself. I was thinking of denouncing it next Sunday. I hope you never read it—won't you sit down, gentlemen?—take this chair— I hope you never read it, Brother Floyd, because the footsteps of—”
― Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

“(There is a Northern and Southern convention of this distinguished denomination, because before the Civil War the Northern Baptists proved by the Bible, unanswerably, that slavery was wrong; and the Southern Baptists proved by the Bible, irrefutably, that slavery was the will of God.)”
― Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

“Though Elmer was the athletic ideal of the college, though his occult passion, his heavy good looks, caused the college girls to breathe quickly, though his manly laughter was as fetching as his resonant speech, Elmer was never really liked. He was supposed to be the most popular man in college; every one believed that everyone else adored him; and none of them wanted to be with him. They were all a bit afraid, a bit uncomfortable, and more than a bit resentful.

It was not merely that he was a shouter, a pounder on backs, an overwhelming force, so that there was never any refuge of intimacy with him. It was because he was always demanding. Except with his widow mother, whom he vaguely worshiped, and with Jim Lefferts, Elmer assumed that he was the center of the universe and that the rest of the system was valuable only as it afforded him help and pleasure.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

“the Fundamentalists' crusade. ("Outrageous!" from the leonine gentleman.) They were mild enough now; they spoke in the name of virtue; but give them rope, and there would be a new Inquisition, a new hunting of witches.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

“llegar a un lugar donde pudieses amar lo que se te antojara —donde no necesitaras permiso para desear— era la libertad.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon—everything belonged to the men who had the guns”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. It's an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“the lesson she had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. “They don’t know when to stop,” she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had. The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“You have a very rough way of expressing your tastes," said Mrs. Murray with a shiver, as they got into her carriage. "Do you know, I never could understand the humor of joking about funerals."

"That surprises me," said Mr. Dudley. "A good funeral needs a joke. If mine is not more amusing than my friends', I would rather not go to it.”
― Henry Adams, Esther

“Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Jim’s father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“The Africans never asked us to come, you know. There’s no use blaming them if we feel unwelcome.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“They say nobody so crazy they think they can say who was the first man.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“It’s times like this make me know us didn’t make this world. And all the colored folks talking bout loving everybody just ain’t looked hard at what they thought they said.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ’em you enjoys ’em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“She say, Celie! Like she shock. He gave you life, good health, and a good woman that love you to death. Yeah, I say, and he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see again. Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Even the picture of Christ which generally looks good anywhere looks peculiar here.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Or perhaps it is the pagan transformation of God from patriarchal male supremacist into trees, stars, wind, and everything else, that camouflaged for many readers the book’s intent: to explore the difficult path of someone who starts out in life already a spiritual captive, but who, through her own courage and the help of others, breaks free into the realization that she, like Nature itself, is a radiant expression of the heretofore perceived as quite distant Divine. If it is true that it is what we run from that chases us, then The Color Purple (this color that is always a surprise but is everywhere in nature) is the book that ran me down while I sat with my back to it in a field.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“White folks is a miracle of affliction,”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“You Christians come here, try hard to change us, get sick and go back to England, or wherever you come from.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“It is no mystery how and at what point in time African Americans, like the characters in this novel, began believing in a God designed to guide and further the desires of another people, a God who thought of blackness as a curse.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple