Kristen > Kristen's Quotes

“Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched. The meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination. It obliterated meaning itself. If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience. Lenses enlarge the sight, omit its context, and make of it a pretty and sensible picture, like something on a Christmas card. I assure you, if you send any shepherds a Christmas card on which is printed a three-by-three photograph of the angel of the Lord, the glory of the Lord, and a multitude of the heavenly host, they will not be sore afraid. More fearsome things can come in envelopes. More moving photographs than those of the sun’s corona can appear in magazines. But I pray you will never see anything more awful in the sky.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“Upheavals come only when man is set on some particular way of life, and is called to forgo that. When the fixed desire is to do the Father’s Will, then there is no real change. The leaving of home, town, country is but as the putting off a garment that has served its useful purpose.”
― A.J. Russell, God Calling/God at Eventide: Two Classic Devotionals, for Morning and Evening Reading

“You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“Some parts of the Altiverse listen—those are the Magic worlds. Some don’t and would rather that you listened to them. Those are the Science worlds. Understand that, and the whole thing is kind of simple.”
― Anonymous

“He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic R&R, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple.”
― Anonymous

“Seek to do less and to accomplish more, to achieve more. Doing is action. Achievement is successful action.”
― A.J. Russell, God Calling/God at Eventide: Two Classic Devotionals, for Morning and Evening Reading

“In this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. Our deep longings are never really satisfied. What this means, among other things, is that we are not restful creatures who sometimes get restless, fulfilled people who sometimes are dissatisfied, serene people who sometimes experience disquiet. Rather, we are restless people who occasionally find rest, dissatisfied people who occasionally find fulfillment, and disquieted people who occasionally find serenity. We do not naturally default into rest, satisfaction, and quiet but into their opposite.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

“Write a book,” he told me, “that I can give to my adult children to explain why I still believe in God and why I still go to church—and that I can read on days when I am no longer sure why I believe or go to church.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

“Your loved ones are very safe in My Keeping. Learning and loving and working, theirs is a life of happiness and progress. They live to serve, and serve they truly do. They serve Me and those they love. Ceaselessly they serve.”
― A.J. Russell, God Calling/God at Eventide: Two Classic Devotionals, for Morning and Evening Reading

“Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history—and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.”28 Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively. One recovering heroin and crack addict on the Downtown Eastside, Dean Wilson, put it to me simply. “Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“So, the one thing means extreme focus and a lot of work – one important thing at a time. The authors suggest that you should use the focusing question: “What is the one thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
― Alan Adams, Passion To Profit: 7 Steps To Building A Kick-Ass Creative Agency

“The authors suggest you should reserve four hours of non-interrupted time from your day only to work with your one thing. I’d say that four hours is a big ask for most agency owners, but I would advocate at least 90 minutes a day, preferably first thing before you do anything else.   And”
― Alan Adams, Passion To Profit: 7 Steps To Building A Kick-Ass Creative Agency

“is possible to be effectively doing while you are delightfully being, in your ordinary workaday world.”
― David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

“The poet W.H. Auden wrote that people come in two varieties: Utopians, who imagine the perfect world in the future, and Edenists, who, if life is not perfect now, believe it once was in the past.”
― Margaret Mark, The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes

“The virtue of angels is that they cannot deteriorate; their flaw is that they cannot improve. Man’s flaw is that he can deteriorate; and his virtue is that he can improve. —Hasidic saying”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“A man whose axe was missing suspected his neighbor’s son. The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and spoke like a thief. But the man found his axe while he was digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor’s son, the boy walked, looked, and spoke like any other child.”
― Jane Yolen, Favorite Folktales from Around the World

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man. Lorren”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I have found consolation, for example, in C. S. Lewis's depiction in The Great Divorce of hell as a place that people choose, and continue to choose even when they end up there. As Milton's Satan put it, "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
― Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?

“Songs choose their hour and their own season. When your tune’s tin, there is a reason. The tone of a tune is your heart’s mettle, and there’s no clear water from a muddy well. All you can do is let the silt settle, or you’ll sound sour as a broken bell.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“As a Jewish rabbi put it, "A man should carry two stones in his pocket. On one should be inscribed, ‘I am but dust and ashes.' On the other, ‘For my sake was the world created.' And he should use each stone as he needs it."7-11”
― Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?

“Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope."7-19 He lists hope at the end, instead of where I would normally expect it, at the beginning, as the fuel that keeps a person going. No, hope emerges from the struggle, a byproduct of faithfulness.”
― Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?

“As Dennis Covington has written, "Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend." 7-20”
― Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.7-22 REINHOLD NIEBUHR”
― Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?

“We understand God best, Dorothy Sayers suggests, by thinking of God as a creative artist. Imagine God as an engineer or watchmaker or immovable force, and you will go astray. God's image shines through us most clearly in the act of creation-comprising the three stages of Idea, Expression, and Recognition-and by reproducing this act we may begin to grasp, by analogy, the Trinity.”
― Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“You’ve got to spend your money for the things that money can buy, not worry about profit or loss. Save your energy for the things that money can’t buy.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle