Hannah > Hannah's Quotes

“This realization is much like Donald Miller's awakening after a day of protesting President Bush: "More than my questions about the efficacy of social action were my questions about my own motives. Do I want social justice for the oppressed, or do I just want to be known as a socially active person? I spend 95 percent of my time thinking about myself anyway. I don't have to watch the evening news to see that the world is bad, I only have to look at myself.... I was the very problem that I had been protesting. I wanted to make a sign that read "I AM THE PROBLEM!" "

I cannot plead innocent. I have contributed to the sum total of misery in the world. ...Or, as Casey incisively remarks, "I have more evidence of crime against myself than I have for any other human being. My conscience accuses me directly of so much malice, whereas I know only by hearsay of the evil done by others. To be humble before God is to know that I am blameworthy." "

Such Christian humility is not the same thing as low self-esteem or poor self-image. It is simply the refusal to be deluded by the lie that I am guiltless: "Empowered by the intensity of God's unconditional love for me, I find it possible to demolish my defenses and admit to the truth of my condition. There is nothing in my constitution or personal history that would give me any confidence in my own competence to bring my life to a happy conclusion.”
― Dennis Okholm

“(Quoted in Dennis Okholm's Monk Habits for Everyday People) Settle down in your room at a moment when you have nothing else to do. Say "I am now with myself," and just sit with yourself. After an amazingly short time you will most likely feel bored. This teaches us one very useful thing. It gives us insight into the fact that if after ten minutes of being alone with ourselves we feel like that, it is no wonder that others should feel equally bored! Why is this so? It is so because we have so little to offer to our own selves as food for thought, for emotion and for life. If you watch your life carefully you will discover quite soon that we hardly ever live from within outwards; instead we respond to incitement, to excitement. In other words, we live by reflection, by reaction... We are completely empty, we do not act from within ourselves but accept as our life a life which is actually fed in from the outside; we are used to things happening which compel us to do other things. How seldom can we live simply by means of the depth and the richness we assume that there is within ourselves. ”
― Anthony Bloom

“Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer. Laughter must be heard in the outer courts of religion, and the echoes of it should resound in the sanctuary; but there is no laughter in the holy of holies. There laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is fulfilled by faith.

The intimate relation between humour and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. ... Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence, which threaten the very meaning of our life.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, Discerning the Signs of the Times: Sermons for Today and Tomorrow

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you asked me how I felt when they told me I would marry Wen Fu, I can say only this: It was like being told I had won a big prize. And it was also like being told my head was going to be chopped off. Something between those two feelings.”
― Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife

“In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality.”
― Azar Nafisi

“People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, "The baby is crying, you should feed her," and the maternal grandmother will say, "Why is that baby crying so much, making her mom so tired?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.”
― Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?

“You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment. The terrible phone call, the rainstorm, the sinister knock on the door—they will all come. Soon enough arrive the treacherous villain and the unfair trial and the smoke and the flames of the suspicious fires to burn everything away. In the meantime, it is best to grab what wonderful moments you find lying around.”
― Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?

“They were probably hitting the town. I hoped it was hitting them back.”
― Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?

“Hungry licked her spoon and then pointed it at me. 'Aren't you forgetting the dishes?' she asked.

'Absolutely not,' I said. 'I'll remember the dishes as long as I live. See you later, Hungry.”
― Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?

“The trouble with being patient is that eventually you get tired of it.”
― Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?

“If you're not scared, she told me, it's not bravery.”
― Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?

“They say in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind.”
― Lemony Snicket, Who Could That Be at This Hour?

“She was responsible for the things she chose. That's all. She almost managed a tiny smile. It was simultaneously an incredible responsibility and almost nothing at all, she thought wonderingly.”
― Hiromi Goto, Half World

“Moxie gave me a small smile. "Why do you always say that- which here means?"
"I'll probably outgrow it," I said.”
― Lemony Snicket, Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?

“Polly Partial handed me a piece of paper printed on all sides with confusing times and locations. It looked like a herd of numbers having a square dance. I would rather have reread her book [To Kill a Mockingbird] than Stain'd-by-the-Sea's confusing train schedule, but just barely.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“The phone wavered in Richard's hand. He was holding it about half an inch away from his ear anyway because it seemed that somebody had dipped the earpiece in some chow mein recently, but that wasn't so bad. It was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it was working at all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I mean, it's like we all get our raw materials from our families―but it's up to us whether we build bridges or bombs.”
― Neal Shusterman, The Schwa Was Here

“It's called loitering, which is like littering with human beings as the trash.”
― Neal Shusterman, The Schwa Was Here

“The building was no warmer than the street outside, and it smelled like something died in there from smelling something else that died in there.”
― Neal Shusterman, The Schwa Was Here

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Jesus, Willard says, “does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God