Kyle Potter > Kyle's Quotes

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.”
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary

“Sometimes dead is better”
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary

“The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The mind that comes to rest is tended
In ways that it cannot intend:
Is borne, preserved, and comprehended
By what it cannot comprehend.”
― Wendell Berry, Sabbaths

“Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.”
― Archbishop Rowan Williams

“the new humanity that is created around Jesus is not a humanity that is always going to be successful and in control of things, but a humanity that can reach out its hand from the depths of chaos, to be touched by the hand of God.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“I have never quite managed to see how we can make sense of the sacramental life of the Church without a theology of the risen body; and I have never managed to see how to put together such a theology without belief in the empty tomb. If a corpse clearly marked ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ turned up, I should save myself a lot of trouble and become a Quaker.”
― Rowan Williams

“To share Eucharistic communion with someone unbaptized, or committed to another story or system, is odd—not because the sacrament is 'profaned', or because grace cannot be given to those outside the household, but because the symbolic integrity of the Eucharist depends upon its being celebrated by those who both commit themselves to the paradigm of Jesus' death and resurrection and acknowledge that their violence is violence offered to Jesus. All their betrayals are to be understood as betrayals of him; and through that understanding comes forgiveness and hope. Those who do not so understand themselves and their sin or their loss will not make the same identification of their victims with Jesus, nor will they necessarily understand their hope for their vocation in relation to him and his community. Their participation is thus anomalous: it is hard to see the meaning of what is being done.”
― Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

“One of the great tragedies and errors of the way people have understood the Bible has been the assumption that what people did in the Old Testament must have been right ‘because it’s in the Bible’. It has justified violence, enslavement, abuse and suppression of women, murderous prejudice against gay people; it has justified all manner of things we now cannot but as Christians regard as evil. But they are not there in the Bible because God is telling us, ‘That’s good.’ They are there because God is telling us, ‘You need to know that that is how some people responded. You need to know that when I speak to human beings things can go very wrong as well as very wonderfully.’ God tells us, ‘You need to know that when I speak, it isn’t always simple to hear, because of what human beings are like.’ We need, in other words, to guard against the temptation to take just a bit of the whole story and treat it as somehow a model for our own behaviour. Christians have often been down that road and it has not been a pretty sight. We need rather to approach the Bible as if it were a parable of Jesus. The whole thing is a gift, a challenge and an invitation into a new world, seeing yourself afresh and more truthfully.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“To be baptized is to recover the humanity that God first intended. What did God intend? He intended that human beings should grow into such love for him and such confidence in him that they could rightly be called God’s sons and daughters. Human”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
― Brene Brown

“You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.”
― Brene Brown

“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
― Richard Rohr

“every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Though its leadership fights to keep the doctrine pure, the faith is constantly contaminated, syncretized, revered, and tinkered with by its adherents - and by outsiders like me, who it continues to influence. It's sentimental and businesslike, the faith of superstitious peasants and of brainy postmodern Jesuits. It's undergirded a great deal of radical immigrant and labor activism for generations, but it's also been a reactionary force wielding money and power in support of political bosses.”
― Sara Miles

“Bonhoeffer knew that when the church stops talking about Jesus, it has nothing to say. And when it assumes dominance, it’s not talking about Jesus.”
― Samuel Wells

“St Laurence gathered the poor, the blind, and the lame together in the church in Rome and brought in the rapacious Roman authorities, proclaiming, “Here are the riches of the Church!”

Whenever Christians refuse to use the word “Church” as a synonym for “those in prominent roles in the clergy hierarchy,” but instead assume and take for granted that “Church” means principally the uncelebrated, the downtrodden, and the poor, the Holy Spirit is active in making the stories of Church history live in the habits of Christian speech.”
― Samuel Wells, God's Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics

“He makes Himself known to those who, after doing all that their powers will allow, confess that they need help from Him.”
― Origen

“One who prays ceaselessly is one who combines prayer with work and work with prayer.”
― Origen, On Prayer

“In souls, there is no illness caused by evilness [ἀπὸ κακίας] that is impossible to cure [ἀδύνατον θεραπευθῆναι] for God the Logos, who is superior to all." (CC 8.72)”
― Origen, Contra Celsum

“Christ reigns in order to save." (Hom. in Luc. 30)”
― Origen, Homilies on Luke, Fragments on Luke

“In a world that didn’t accept the word of a woman as a valid witness, Jesus chose women as witnesses for his resurrection. In a world that gave husbands power over the very lives of their wives, Paul told husbands to do the opposite—to give up their lives for their wives. In a world that saw women as biologically deformed men, monstrous even, Paul declared that men were just like women in Christ.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

“The problem is not that Jesus was male but that more men are not like Jesus.”
― Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse

“We pass from thinking of God as part of our life to the realization that we are part of his life.”
― Richard J. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home