Melissa > Melissa's Quotes

“[T]welve year old Libby O'Shea coasted on a homemade swing, toes touching a blinding-blue heaven dolloped with clouds.”
― Julie Lessman, A Passion Denied

“The moon hung heavy over the lake like an overripe orange, trickling its golden stream of light across inky depths.”
― Julie Lessman, A Passion Denied

“One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time.”
― John Piper

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”
― Stephen King

“Nor is it the spirit of those Christians - alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves.

The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor - spending and being spent - to enrich their fellowmen, giving time, trouble, care and concern to do good to others - and not just their own friends - in whatever way there seems need.”
― J.I. Packer, Knowing God

“The number one responsibility for each of us is to change ourselves with hope that others will follow.”
― Ron Paul

“Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.”
― Zig Ziglar

“If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it's yours.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it was not me.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

“but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
― Jane Austen

“You know who Mr. Darcy is?"
"I exist, therefore I know who Mr. Darcy is.”
― Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon

“The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.”
― Stephen King, Night Shift

“Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.”
― Jane Austen

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”
― John Adams

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
― George Orwell

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
― C.S. Lewis

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
― Sid Ziff

“Really, becoming a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice.”
― Shannon Hale

“I can cry at the drop of a hat."
"You find hat-dropping distressful?"
"If it's a nice hat, and it has dropped in the mud, certainly. I could cry about that for days.”
― Jen Turano, A Most Peculiar Circumstance

“I don't reckon men are supposed to think," Sally said philosophically, as the pile of hemp rope grew at her feet. "That's why God gave 'em big muscles.”
― Mary Connealy, Petticoat Ranch

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“You don't teach virtue by preaching virtue. You teach virtue by requiring virtuous behavior, so that virtuous behavior becomes a habit.”
― Leonard Sax, The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups

“The pretence leads up to the real thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.”
― Alexander Hamilton

“As for the wretchedness and sins about which he heard daily, instead of being astonished by them, he was on the contrary surprised that there were not still more of them, considering the malice of which the sinner is capable. He prayed for the sinner and then did not trouble himself any more, knowing that God could change the sinner when it was His will to do so.”
― Abbé de Beaufort, Grand Vicar of the Cardinal of Noailles

“I am very serious when I say this, beware of your dreams, for dreams make dangerous friends. We all have them—longings for a better life, a healthy child, a happy marriage, rewarding work. But dreams are, I have come to believe, misplaced longings. False lovers. Why? Because God is enough. Just God. And he isn’t “enough” because he can make our dreams come true—no, you’ve got him confused with Santa or Merlin or Oprah. The God who created the universe is enough for us—even without our dreams.”
― Phil Vischer, Me, Myself, and Bob: A True Story About Dreams, God, and Talking Vegetables

“Taleb opens the book with a poetic image that should speak to all parents. He notes that wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. He advises us not to be like candles and not to turn our children into candles: "You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”
― Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“She decided that her wisest course would be to put him out of her mind. After reaching this conclusion she lay thinking about him until at last she fell asleep.”
― Georgette Heyer, The Nonesuch