Sara > Sara's Quotes

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”
― Andrew Carnegie

“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...”
― C.S. Lewis

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A real pastor — a good shepherd — is always concerned about the personal development of every individual person in his church.”
― Pastor Adelaja Sunday

“We used to sing the hymn “Take Time to Be Holy.” But perhaps we should be singing, “Take time to be human.” Or finally, “Take time.” Sabbath is taking time … time to be holy … time to be human.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Despair takes on a different look, depending on where you go, but those who have lived it can see it in others.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“Nothing is so essential as dignity…Time will reveal who has it and who has it not.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“In all our lives, there are days that we wish we could see expunged from the record of our very existence. Perhaps we long for that erasure because a particular day brought us such splintering sorrow that we can scarcely bear to think of it ever again. Or we might wish to blot out an episode forever because we behaved so poorly on that day - we were mortifyingly selfish, or foolish to an extraordinary degree. Or perhaps we injured another person and wish to disremember the guilt. Tragically, there are some days in a lifetime when all three of those things happen at once - when we are heartbroken and foolish and unforgivably injurious to others, all at the same time.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Well, child, you may do whatever you like with your suffering,” Hanneke said mildly. “It belongs to you. But I shall tell you what I do with mine. I grasp it by the small hairs, I cast it to the ground, and I grind it under the heel of my boot. I suggest you learn to do the same.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Instead of being a point of pride for Christians, shouldn't the historical continuity of a practice that has caused women to fare much worse than men for thousands of years caused concern? Shouldn't Christians, who are called to be different from the world, treat women differently?

What if patriarchy isn't divinely ordained but is a result of human sin?”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Like racism, patriarchy is a shapeshifter—conforming to each new era, looking as if it has always belonged.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Ideas matter. Ideas that depict women as less than men influence men to treat women as less than men. Ideas that objectify women result in women being treated like objects (sex objects, mostly).”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Ironically, complementarian theology claims it is defending a plain and natural interpretation of the Bible while really defending an interpretation that has been corrupted by our sinful human drive to dominate others and build hierarchies of power and oppression. I can’t think of anything less Christlike than hierarchies like these.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Patriarchy walks hand in hand with racism, and it always has. The same biblical passages used to declare black people unequal are used to declare women unfit for leadership. Patriarchy and racism are "interlocking structures of oppression" Isn't it time we get rid of both?”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“When we differentiate women because of their sex, we objectify them and deny them their humanity.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Patriarchy looks right because it is the historical practice of the world.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“Patriarchy walks with structural racism and systemic oppression, and it has done so consistently throughout history.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Being confronted with racist ideas or behavior—our own or in the systems we’re part of—is hard, but it is not the worst thing. The worst thing is being unwilling to listen, unwilling to do better.”
― Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

“Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants come to a place and become part of the existing political system.”
― Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

“p. 26: Unlike the Christian creation story, the Anishinaabe creation story does not contain a fall or an expulsion. Our expulsion only happens later: at the time of colonization, when the Western world arrives at our doorstep.”
― Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

“Grief is the persistence of love,” Krawec writes. Indeed. Grief and love are not bound by time and space. In Indigenous worlds, Land Defenders act out of necessity and survival, protecting rivers and landscapes from destruction. They do so out of mourning for a world taken from them through centuries of colonialism. But they also do so out of love and solidarity for life that currently exists and life that has yet to be created on this planet. They are ancestors of the future, motivated by grief as the persistence of love. Grief is also about remembering, or unforgetting, the future and a history that could have been.”
― Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future