Meg > Meg's Quotes

“The fields...are white already to harvest" (John 4:35 KJV), or as other versions put it, "ripe for harvest."...One part of the harvest metaphor we may have missed was the importance of timing-there is a season for both sowing and reaping, and sometimes there is a season of simply waiting and watering.”
― Keri Wyatt Kent, Deeper into the Word: Reflections on 100 Words From the New Testament

“The Qu'ran is God's song, not ours, not even Muhammad's. To allow such a song to pass through one's body, however imperfectly, is to discover that the instrument is transformed by the music.”
― George Dardess, Meeting Islam: A Guide for Christians

“A lost person or article is still what it is, still valuable in itself, but in the wrong place, disconnected from its purpose and unable to be or do whatever it is intended to be or do.”
― David Winter, What's In a Word: 40 Words of Jesus for the 40 Days of Lent

“I have to ask myself how I can possibly expect to know Jesus as he would want to be known if my life remains unscathed by trouble and grief. How can I hope to grasp anything of God's heart for this broken planet if I never weep because its brokenness touches me and breaks my heart? How can I reflect his image if I never share in his sufferings? And how will any of us ever learn to treasure his hesed and grace if we never experience phases where these blessings seem absent?”
― Carolyn Custis James

“Maybe the Truth of the Meaning of Life, Ancient and Arcane Knowledge of the Great Unknowable Universe is handed down only to persons presenting with the correct brand-name footwear. If you turn up wearing Shoe City knock-offs, you don't get to pass Go and collect Infinite Enlightenment.”
― Tracy Engelbrecht, The Girl Who Couldn't Say No

“Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“One step across the dividing line, so like the one between the living and the dead and you enter an unknown world of suffering and death. What will you find there? Who will be there? There, just just beyond the field, that tree, that sunlit roof? No one knows, and yet you want to know. You dread crossing that line, and yet you want to cross it. You know sooner or later you will have to go across and find out what is there beyond it, just as you must inevitably found out what lies beyond death. Yet here you are, fit and strong, carefree and excited, with men all around you just the same- strong, excited and full of life.' This is what all men think when they get sight of the enemy, or they feel it if they do not think it, and it is this feeling that gives a special lustre and a delicious edge to the awareness of everything that is now happening.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“He has borne with thousands of foul and abominable sins which you have committed against Him, yet even they have not been enough to make Him cease looking upon you. Is it such a great matter, then, for you to avert the eyes of your soul from the outward things and sometimes to look at Him?”
― Santa Teresa de Jesús

“No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks can not be saved. or anything else worth a damn. wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. for my own part i would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven days. Even on a symbolic level, that's creation in a frenzy. To one born in a religion where the battle for a single soul can be a relay race run over many centuries, with innumerable generations passing along the baton, the quick resolution of Christianity has a dizzying effect. If Hinduism flows placidly like the Ganges, then Christianity bustles like Toronto at rush hour. It is religion as swift as a swallow, as urgent as an ambulance. It turns on a dime, expresses itself in the instant. In a moment you are lost or saved. Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“This book I'm reading says if you want to be as thin as a stalk of celery, then that's what you should be eating. I'm not sure I want to look like celery, but I know I don't want to look like a biscuit.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“And I have no control over which yesterdays I keep and which ones get deleted. This disease will not be bargained with. I can't offer it the names of the US presidents in exchange for the names of my children. I can't give it the names of state capitals and keep the memories of my husband.
...My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I'll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I'll forget it some tomorrow doesn't mean that I didn't live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn't mean that today doesn't matter.”
― Lisa Genova, Still Alice

“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“When the average American says, “I’m starving,” it is a prelude to a midnight raid on a well-stocked refrigerator or a sudden trip to the nearest fast food restaurant.”
― Carolyn Custis James, The Gospel of Ruth: Loving God Enough to Break the Rules