Tania > Tania's Quotes

“Someone else is doing the living for me, and all I have to do is let their stories, humor, knowledge, and images—some of which I’ll never forget—flow through me, even as I forget to turn off the car when I arrive at my destination.”
― Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

“Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Emotions are part of the equation of our lives, but not the entire equation. Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it is good. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad. Emotions are merely signposts, suggestions that our neurobiology gives us, not commandments. Therefore, we shouldn’t always trust our own emotions. In fact, I believe we should make a habit of questioning them.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life’s problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Reader, if you’d rather live in your reading moment than document it, I totally get it. I’d rather be reading too. But learn from my bookish regret: I don’t care what system you use (and I use the word system loosely) as long as you use one. Start today, because as soon as you begin, you’re going to wish you’d begun sooner. Record your books as a gift to your future self, a travelogue you’ll be able to pull off the shelf years from now, to remember the journey.”
― Anne Bogel, I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life

“Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of being in the world that is simple, nonviolent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established religion (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. We could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain throughout most of Christian history and still believe that Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior or continue, in good standing, to receive the sacraments. The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on earth is too great.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“Jesus is never afraid to put things in a challenging, parabolic way. He even seems to prefer this method (Matthew 13:3, 34). Jesus is not afraid of using a word or idea that’s likely to be misunderstood (I wish I had that courage!). He puts his truth out there; dealing with it is the listener’s problem (which is actually to respect the listener’s spiritual intelligence). Jesus is saying, in effect, “Struggle with what I’m saying!” In general, Jesus doesn’t spend a great deal of time qualifying his point and making sure everybody understands it clearly.”
― Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

“There’s an extent to which your analysis of your own work is an interesting jumping-off point for criticism, but there’s equally an extent to which your writing is its own entity and exists independent of you and your intentions and your hopes and dreams.”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

“In one fascinating study, conducted at Washington University’s Dynamic Cognition Laboratory and published in the journal Psychological Science in 2009, researchers used brain scans to examine what happens inside people’s heads as they read fiction. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences.” The brain regions that are activated often “mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.” Deep reading, says the study’s lead researcher, Nicole Speer, “is by no means a passive exercise.”35 The reader becomes the book.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“A KITE FOR AIBHÍN AFTER “L’AQUILONE” BY GIOVANNI PASCOLI (1855-1912) Air from another life and time and place, Pale blue heavenly air is supporting A white wing beating high against the breeze, And yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoon All of us there trooped out Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn, I take my stand again, halt opposite Anahorish Hill to scan the blue, Back in that field to launch our long-tailed comet. And now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew, Lifts itself, goes with the wind until It rises to loud cheers from us below. Rises, and my hand is like a spindle Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher The longing in the breast and planted feet And gazing face and heart of the kite flier Until string breaks and—separate, elate— The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.”
― Seamus Heaney, Human Chain: Poems

“Our only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort. It’s not a comfortable conversation for any of us. It is risky and messy. It is haunting work to recall the sins of our past. But is this not the work we have been called to anyway? Is this not the work of the Holy Spirit to illuminate truth and inspire transformation? It’s haunting. But it’s also holy.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“Because I am a Black person, my anger is considered dangerous, explosive, and unwarranted. Because I am a woman, my anger supposedly reveals an emotional problem or gets dismissed as a temporary state that will go away once I choose to be rational. Because I am a Christian, my anger is dismissed as a character flaw, showing just how far I have turned from Jesus. Real Christians are nice, kind, forgiving—and anger is none of those things.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer’s mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press—a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“When we do things with only a part of the mind, we are just skimming the surface of life. Nothing sinks in; nothing has real impact. It leads to an empty feeling inside. Unfortunately, it is this very emptiness that drives us to pack in even more, seeking desperately to fill the void in our hearts. What we need to do is just the opposite: to slow down and live completely in the present. Then every moment will be full.”
― Eknath Easwaran, Take Your Time: The Wisdom of Slowing Down

“In both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, narrative and other more-or-less literary forms are dominant, which seems to call for a strategy of reading for understanding similar to what one might use in an encounter with, say, Homer; but these books’ status as sacred text suggests, to many modern readers anyway, that their purpose is to provide information about God and God’s relation to human beings. “Strip-mining” the Psalms, or the Song of Solomon, or even the more elevated discourses of the Gospel of John, “for relevant content” might not seem like a promising strategy, but many generations of pastors have pushed it pretty hard, as though the Bible were no more than an awkwardly coded advice manual.)”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick