Pat Loughery > Pat's Quotes

“When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered.”
― John O'Donohue

“May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

“What's more American than violence?" Hayduke wanted to know. "Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“THAT NO ONE knows what happened to Jesus’s foreskin is particularly interesting because there used to be upwards of a dozen in circulation.”
― Peter Manseau, Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead

“No other foreskin could have caused such trouble.”
― Peter Manseau, Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead

“Another friend of mine once told me in a deep depression that his marriage was "like running a preschool with a roommate you used to date." Nice.”
― Nigel Marsh, Fat, Forty, and Fired: One man's frank, funny, and inspiring account of losing his job and finding his life

“There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“As participants in a mobile culture, our default is to move. God embraces our broken world, and I have no doubt that God can use our movement for good. But I am convinced that we lose something essential to our existence as creatures if we do not recognize our fundamental need for stability. Trees can be transplanted, often with magnificent results. But their default is to stay.”
― Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture

“Staying, we all know, is not the norm in our mobile culture. A great deal of money is spent each day to create desires in each of us that can never be fulfilled. I suspect that much of our restlessness is a return on this investment.”
― Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy — had never not been happy — and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“For the Christian tradition, the heart’s true home is a life rooted in the love of God. Like Lao-tzu and Dorothy both, Christian wisdom about stability points us toward the true peace that is possible when our spirits are stilled and our feet are planted in a place we know to be holy ground.”
― Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture

“We learn to dwell with God by learning the practices of hospitality, listening, forgiveness, and reconciliation—the daily tasks of life with other people. Stability in Christ is always stability in community”
― Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture

“To climb ever closer to God is not to move away from our troubled and troubling neighbors, but closer to them.”
― Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture

“This story is not and never was meant to challenge anyone's faith; however, if one's faith can be shaken by stories in a humorous novel, one may have a bit more praying to do.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“If you have come to these pages for laughter, may you find it.
If you are here to be offended, may your ire rise and your blood boil.
If you seek an adventure, may this song sing you away to blissful escape.
If you need to test or confirm your beliefs, may you reach comfortable conclusions.
All books reveal perfection, by what they are or what they are not.
May you find that which you seek, in these pages or outside them.
May you find perfection, and know it by name.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.”
― Maya Angelou

“Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”
― Mark Twain

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.”
― Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.”
― Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades

“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”
― Frederick Buechner

“If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.”
― Kathleen Norris

“I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.”
― Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

“The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it”
― Nouwen Henri J. M.

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott