Peter Story > Peter's Quotes

“Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”
― George Saunders

“We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”
― Noam Chomsky

“My life has a superb cast, but I cannot figure out the plot.”
― Ashleigh Brilliant

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“There's always some further action to take.”
― Pierre Boulle

“Who, for example, would have ever predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that the poet who overuses the word I in his poetry is at higher risk of suicide? Or that a certain world leader’s use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he’d lead his country into war? By looking more carefully at the ways people convey their thoughts in language we can begin to get a sense of their personalities, emotions, and connections with others.”
― James W. Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us

“If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.”
― Adam Lindsay Gordon

“Literature is humanity talking to itself.”
― Norman Rush

“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”
― Henry Green

“I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.”
― Stephen Greenblatt

“Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion...The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even--heaven help us--Biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically-rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way...with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom. I believe if we face the question, "if not now, then when?" if we are grasped by this vision we may also hear the question, "if not us, then who?" And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?”
― N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was & Is

“We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.”
― Walter Mosley, Blue Light

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“Sometimes life just … happens. And sometimes it hurts, and we
can’t stop it. We can’t control it, no matter how hard we try. And that
hurts even more.”
― Peter J. Story, Things Grak Hates

“It’s good to deal with a group that knows how to nod. So many these days
are halfhearted at best.”
― Peter J. Story, Things Grak Hates

“When the bird of the heart begins to sing, too often will reason stop up her ears.”
― Hans Christian Andersen

“Well, don't mistake kindness for stupidity, Grak.”
― Peter J. Story, Things Grak Hates

“I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Once abolish the God and the government becomes the God.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Christendom in Dublin