Christina Baehr > Christina's Quotes

“But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“We shall have made such a blaze that men will remember us on the other side or the dark.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff

“Many people think of our times as being the last before the end of the world. The evidence of horror all around us makes this seem possible. But isn't that an idea of only minor importance? Doesn't every human being, no matter which era he lives in, always have to reckon with being accountable to God at any moment? Can I know whether I'll be alive tomorrow morning? A bomb could destroy all of us tonight. And then my guilt would not be one bit less than if I perished together with the arth and the stars.”
― Sophie Scholl

“He picked up one of the dead bats and covered it with his handkerchief. ‘Somebody’s mother,’ he murmured reverently.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith

“In me there is darkness,
But with You there is light;
I am lonely, but You do not leave me;
I am feeble in heart, but with You there is help;
I am restless, but with You there is peace.
In me there is bitterness, but with You there is patience;
I do not understand Your ways,
But You know the way for me.”

“Lord Jesus Christ,
You were poor
And in distress, a captive and forsaken as I am.
You know all man’s troubles;
You abide with me
When all men fail me;
You remember and seek me;
It is Your will that I should know You
And turn to You.
Lord, I hear Your call and follow;
Help me.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...”
― C.S. Lewis

“There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children

“It is only because he became like us that we can become like him.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“We have, by God's grace, been given another day to serve and love, laugh and learn, pray and ponder. Spring is ready to burst into the open air, and we are ready to embrace it.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey Into Christian Faith

“There is no object that we see, no action that we do, no good that we enjoy, no evil that we feel of fear, but we may make some spiritual advantage of all.”
― Anne Bradstreet

“And so I discovered that it is not on our own forgiveness any more than on our own goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When he tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!”
― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

“Fairy tale does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat...giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy; Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“If we consider the unblushing promises of reward … promised in the Gospels, 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 sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“Be careful whom you choose to hate.
The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly.
Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“Fresh peach pie can lift a bullying reprobate into apologetic courtesy; I have watched it happen.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“Someday, you know, we're going to be shown the great ledger of our recorded decisions-a dread concept you nonetheless know in your deepest soul is true.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“In God, the life of the flesh became the story of the spirit. I loved that story, no matter what.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“As a writer, I prided myself on seeing and describing the world as it was, not as I wanted it or thought it was supposed to be. I had made my living writing hard-boiled fiction about tough, cynical men and femmes fatales swept up in ugly underworlds of crime, sex, and murder. Would I suddenly be reduced to penning saccharine fluff about some little girl who lost her pet bunny but Jesus brought it back again? “Oh, God,” I prayed fervently more than once, “whatever happens, don’t let me become a Christian novelist!” Even that prospect, terrible as it was, was only a part of the greater danger. If I became a Christian, would I lose my freedom of thought? Would I sacrifice my ability to question every proposition and examine every belief to the bone? Would I lose my realism and my tragic sensibility? Would I descend into that smiley-faced religious idiocy that mistakes the good health and prosperity of the moment for the supernatural favor of God?”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ