Alan Marr > Alan 's Quotes

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Then shadows and shapes, shrouded figures, appeared to join him, apparitions, ancient, mythical faces, wise and beautiful, like holy ghosts, shimmering around around him, beside him, beyond him, enveloped by a brume indescribable, shot through with shafts of pink and blue and gold, as though the heavens themselves had opened up and poured out the light into the world.”
― Peter McKinnon, The Songs of Jesse Adams

“Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“The serpent eating itself, tail-first. We live to repeat the same mistakes, to push away the ones we love, to move on when we want to stay, to wait in silence when we should speak. In the life we have chosen to lead, loss is the only constant. Loss, that eats up everything – like the snake, even itself.”
― Joanne Harris, The Strawberry Thief

“The jubilee then is about restoring to people the capacity to participate in the economic life of the community for their own viability and society's benefit.”
― Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative