T > T's Quotes

“People talk much today of living their truth, and it occurs to me that Jesus is perhaps the only person who's ever fully done that. As the Word made flesh, he embodied truth in a way none of us ever will. He was literal Truth, living breathing, and walking among us . . . We behold His glory.”
― Ruth Buchanan, The Cross in the Culture”
― Ruth Buchanan, The Cross in the Culture: Connecting Our Stories to the Greatest Story Ever Told

“The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell.”
― William Booth

“Hatred eats the soul of the hater, not the hated.”
― Alice Herz Sommer

“Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people”
― Heinrich Heine

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“In this sense, Rachel envied fictional characters. For them, everything would eventually make sense. If she were fictional, all the random, ridiculous events of her life would mold into a recognizable shape, building toward something. She would recognize signs, portents, and foreshadowing. In real life, however, no such clues were forthcoming.”
― Ruth Buchanan, Flexible: A Novel of Mystery, Drama, Rehabilitation, Spiders, and the Occasional Head Wound

“Friends know the patterns of our souls.”
― Ruth Buchanan, The Proper Care and Feeding of Singles: How Pastors, Marrieds, and Church Leaders Effectively Support Solo Members

“Christ nailed all my guilt to the cross. Sometimes, though, I needed a reminder that the nails held.”
― Ruth Buchanan, Murder on Birchardville Hill

“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“Making my bed correctly was not going to be an opportunity for praise. It was expected of me. It was my first task of the day, and doing it right was important. It demonstrated my discipline. It showed my attention to detail, and at the end of the day it would be a reminder that I had done something well, something to be proud of, no matter how small the task.”
― William H. McRaven, Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“The Minnesota State Weather observer at Pine River Dam recorded a minimum temperature of 46 below on December 29; observers at Pokegama Falls and Leech Lake Dam were unable to take temperature readings that day because the mercury inside their government-issued thermometers froze solid. It's hard to find vocabulary for weather this cold. The senses first become sharp and then dulled. Objects etch themselves with hyperclarity on the dense air, but it's hard to keep your eyes open to look at them steadily. When you first step outside from a heated space, the blast from 46-below-zero air clears the mind like a ringing slap. After a breath or two, ice builds up on the hairs of your nasal passages and the clear film bathing your eyeballs thickens. If the wind is calm and your body, head, and hands are covered, you feel preternaturally alert and focused. At first. A dozen paces from the door, your throat begins to feel raw, your lips dry and crack, tears sting the corners of your eyes. The cold becomes at once a knife and, paradoxically, a flame, cutting and scorching exposed skin.”
― David Laskin, The Children's Blizzard

“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Although Greenland's Natural defenses discouraged settlement, some hardy souls insisted, Europeans returned to Greenland, led by a Danish-Norwegian missionary named Hans Egede. Hoping to discover Viking descendants, Egede instead found Inuit people, so he stayed to spread the gospel. Colonization followed though few Danes saw the point of the place. Unlike the native North Americans, the native Inuit people of Greenland never surrendered their majority status to outsiders, though they did embrace Christianity.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II

“Inside the bombers tail, O'Hara confided to Monteverde that he thought his feet were frozen solid Spina heard the navigator say, "I don't even know if I have any feet or not." when Monteverde helped to remove O'Hara's shoes, the men saw an awful sight: the skin on his feet had deep, ugly cracks, and they'd turned sickening shades of blue, yellow, and green.

Monteverde was stunned to find that O'Hara's feet felt nothing like flesh and bone. An awful comparison rushed to his mind, they felt like the cold, hard metal on the butt ends of the plane's machine guns.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II

“When the girls left that afternoon, they left behind the aura of their unsolved problems and dilemmas. I felt exhausted, I chose the only way I knew to cope with problems. I went to the refrigerator, scooped up the coffee ice cream. Poured some cold coffee over it, looked for walnuts, discovered we had none left, went after almonds, crushed them with my teeth and sprinkled them over my concoction.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“In part, he knew, this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison, and here Dodd found deepest irony. “At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting.” He added, “One might easily wish he were a horse!”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“When you fall into a big pile of manure there has to be a pony near by.”
― Patrick Henry Hughes, I Am Potential: Eight Lessons on Living, Loving, and Reaching Your Dreams

“He became one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“No system which implies control by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“The idea that the word of God should be permitted to calcify slowly into a language normal people can’t read is one of the reasons we had a Protestant Reformation, a movement launched by a monk whose first act a er defying a church council with, “My conscience is captive to the word of God” was to hole himself up in Wartburg castle and translate the Bible into German. There he sat; he could do no other.”
― Mark L. Ward Jr., Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible

“The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“We started spending a lot of our free time together, going out to dinner, hanging out and watching TV or going to movies during the week. He’d kiss me, but he wouldn’t sleep with me. For years I’d thought that sex was the best to get things going, to jump-start a relationship. It wasn’t what you waited for. It was what you did, when you figured out the rest afterward , if you bothered to.”
― CAsey Goldberg, Beth Jone, and Pamela Ferdinend

“Many people say a first marriage is training for the second.”
― Casey Goldberg, Beth Jone, and Pamela Ferdinend

“Ultimately, I had to admit that marriage isn’t a life sentence, at least not in the way it’s usually defined. Marrying Phil wasn’t a step toward incarceration. It was love. So I took a breath and sopped fearing what I might lose if I got married, and thought instead about what I was gaining.”
― Casey Goldberg, Beth Jone, and Pamela Ferdinend

“As people who put their trust in Jesus, sometimes we don’t know what to say when we see someone going through an impossible time. Instead of giving them space to name their own narratives, we rush them into a narrative that makes us feel more comfortable. It can be easy to refuse to let people grieve the way they need to grieve by naming their circumstance for them, saying phrases like, “God is in control” or “Consider it all joy!” or “God works all things together for good.”
― freeman, emily p.

“As people who put their trust in Jesus, sometimes we don’t know what to say when we see someone going through an impossible time. Instead of giving them space to name their own narratives, we rush them into a narrative that makes us feel more comfortable. It can be easy to refuse to let people grieve the way they need to grieve by naming their circumstance for them, saying phrases like, “God is in control” or “Consider it all joy!” or “God works all things together for good.”
― freeman, emily p. the next right thing

“Did you really just say "mancation"? Bonnie raised her eyebrows. "I thought he was going fishing."
"He is, but that's what they call it these days when a bunch of guys go off together for a weekend. The resorts have started marketing their packages as "mancations." They get golf, fishing poker--- all that guy stuff.”
― Caroline Cousins, Way Down Dead in Dixie

“One of the worst things you could do to someone in the midst of tragedy was to give them a cliche because the intensity of the loss was too big.”
― Lucinda Berry, When She Returned