Dan > Dan's Quotes

“...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“Black holes are where God divided by zero.”
― Albert Einstein

“One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.”
― Wendell Berry, What Are People For?

“Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”
― Wendell Berry, What Are People For?

“Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to "spiritual" subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.”
― Wendell Berry, What Are People For?

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“The clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.

["Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming," The Westminster Review, 1885.]”
― George Eliot

“In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World