Maren > Maren's Quotes

“Describe plum-blossoms?
Better than my verses...white
Wordless Butterflies”
― Reikan, Japanese Haiku

“Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die”
― Matsuo Bashō

“No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it.”
― Matsuo Bashô

“Awakened at midnight
by the sound of the water jar
cracking from the ice”
― Basho

“Harvest moon:
around the pond I wander
and the night is gone.”
― Matsuo Basho

“Dead my old fine hopes
And dry my dreaming but still...
Iris, blue each spring”
― Shushiki, Japanese Haiku

“Sadly, I part from you;
Like a clam torn from its shell,
I go, and autumn too.”
― Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior

“How I long to see
among dawn flowers,
the face of God.”
― Basho, Haiku

“Summer grasses,
All that remains
Of soldiers' dreams”
― Bashō

“Many solemn nights
Blond moon, we stand and marvel...
Sleeping our noons away”
― Teitoku, Japanese Haiku

“The temple bell stops
But the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers”
― Matsuo Bashō

“El viejo estanque una rana se sumerge ruido de agua”
― Matsuo Bashō, En la eternidad del instante. Haikús de Matsuo Basho.

“Más alto que las alondras reposo en pleno cielo sobre el puerto de la montaña”
― Matsuo Bashō, En la eternidad del instante. Haikús de Matsuo Basho.

“Between our two lives
there is also the life of
the cherry blossom.”
― Matsuo Basho

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Baptism reminds us that there’s no ladder to holiness to climb, no self-improvement plan to follow. It’s just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not, what does it say? but what am I looking for? I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, “ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

“I’ve often said that those who say having a childlike faith means not asking questions haven’t met too many children.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

“I’ve been convinced that LGBT Christians have a special role to play in teaching the church how to be Christian.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“My robust lexicon notwithstanding, I struggle to find the right words to describe just how much I despise, hate, abhor, revile, detest and categorically abominate anything to do with home maintenance. While cooking strikes me as an essentially creative act, cleaning seems little more than an exercise in decay management, enough to trigger an existential crisis each time the ring around the toilet bowl reappears.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

“Before I knowed it, I was sayin' out loud, 'The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing.' . . . . I says, 'What's this call, this sperit?' An' I says, 'It's love. I love people so much I'm fit to bust, sometimes.' . . . . I figgered, 'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit-the human sperit-the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent-I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.”
― Bill Nye

“...drink in the beauty and wonder at the meaning of what you see.”
― Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

“The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.”
― Rachel Carson

“Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal-each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water.”
― Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.”
― Rachel Carson