Matt > Matt's Quotes

“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting. Faith is journeying through space and through time.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction

“He says we are not forsaken. For while I wonder for what we live and struggle and die, for while I wonder what keeps us living and struggling, men are sent to minister to the blind ... Who gives, at this one hour, a friend to make darkness light before me?”
― Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

“[S]orrow is better than fear. For fear impoverishes always, while sorrow may enrich ... Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.”
― Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

“When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.”
― Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

“We do what is in us, and why it is in us, that is also a secret. It is Christ in us, crying that men may be succoured and forgiven, even when He Himself is forsaken.”
― Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
― Albert Einstein

“his curse. “To be thin-skinned, far-sighted, and loose-tongued,” he said, “is to feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely. It is to be vulnerable to the world when the world believes itself invulnerable, to understand its mutability when it thinks itself immutable, to sense what’s coming before others sense it, to know that the barbarian future is tearing down the gates of the present while others cling to the decadent, hollow past.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Each star system is an island in space, quarantined from its neighbors by the light-years. I can imagine creatures evolving into glimmerings of knowledge on innumerable worlds, every one of them assuming at first their puny planet and paltry few suns to be all that is. We grow up in isolation. Only slowly do we teach ourselves the Cosmos.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“... [W]hat is the likelihood that only on ordinary star, the Sun, is accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be so fortunate? To me, it seems far more likely that the universe is brimming over with life. But we humans do not yet know. We are just beginning our explorations. From eight billion light-years away we are hard pressed to find even the cluster in which our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded, much less the Sun or the Earth. The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight, and at this distance utterly lost.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The religious scholars I have consulted are passionate about the need for political leaders to educate themselves in the varieties of faith and to see religion more as a potential means for reconciliation than as a source of conflict.”
― Madeleine Albright

“History would be far different
if we did not tend to hear God
most clearly when we think
He is telling us
exactly what it is
we want to hear”
― Madeleine Albright, The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs – A Bold Critique and Call for Moral Consensus in an Era of Religious Terrorism

“If true Christianity consists in carrying out in our daily lives the teachings of Christ, who will say that we are commanded to civilize with dynamite and proselyte with the sword? ... Imperialism finds no warrant in the Bible. The command 'Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature' has no Gatling gun attachment.”
― William Jennings Bryan

“Yet God does exist in the idea of good, which watches over the birth of every being and leaves in the soul embodied in that being one pure tear. Good is God, and the tear the source of eternal feeling.”
― José Martí, Jose Marti Reader: Writings on the Americas

“God is weeping. And how the people weep when they make God weep!”
― José Martí, Jose Marti Reader: Writings on the Americas

“Think of it as if you were standing on one of those globes with a map on it — I always wanted one when I was a boy.”

“I understand,” she said after a minute. “When you do that, you can feel the earth turn, can’t you?”

He nodded.

“Yes. Otherwise it’s all just mañana — waiting for the morning or the moon.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“The stifling room was musty; it smelled of old furniture and the burned out fires of wintertime...”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Joel gazed down on the jumbled green, trying to picture the music room and the dancers ... but the willows were willows and the goldenrod goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Inasmuch as I was born dead, how ironic that I should die at all; yes, born dead, literally: the midwife was perverse enough to slap me into life. Or did she?”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject?”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“[C]locks indeed must have thier sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“They followed the remnants of a road down which once had spun the wheels of lacquered carriages carrying verbena-scented ladies who twittered like linnets in the shade of parasols; and leathery cotton-rich gentlemen gruffing at each through a violet haze of Havana smoke, and their children, prim little girls with mint crushed in their handkerchiefs, and boys with mean blackberry eyes, little boys who sent their sisters screaming with tales of roaring tigers. Gusts of autumn, exhaling through the inheriting weeds, grieved for the cruel velvet children and their virile bearded fathers: Was, said the weeds, Gone, said the sky, Dead, said the woods, but the full laments of history were left to the Whippoorwill.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Days, fast fading as snowflakes, flurry into autumn, fall all around like November leaves, the sky, cold red with winter, frightens with the light it sheds.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Who needs money anyhow? Leastwise, not right aways we don't ... except for dopes. We ought to save enough so we can have a dope every day cause my brains get fried if I can't have myself an ice-cold dope. And cigarettes. I surely do appreciate a smoke. Dopes and smokes and Henry are the only things I love." "You like me some, don't you?" he said, without meaning really to speak aloud. In any case, Idabel ... did not answer.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Present-day Christians misinterpret the cross when they make it a nonoffensive religious symbol, a decorative object in their homes and churches. The cross, therefore, needs the lynching tree to remind us what it means when we say that God is revealed in Jesus at Golgotha, the place of the skull, on the cross where criminals and rebels against the Roman state were executed. The lynching tree is America's cross.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“Whether theologians acknowledge it or not, all theologies begin with experience ... We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it. For when we mistake our own talk about God with ultimate reality, we turn it into ideology.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian