Ryl > Ryl's Quotes

“How did we learn it, that talent of insatiability?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I have found men who didn't know how to kiss. I've always found time to teach them.”
― Mae West

“I pray where I am, sitting by the window, looking out through the curtain at the empty garden. I don't even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it's an equal darkness. Or light.

My God. Who Art in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within.

I wish you would tell me Your Name, the real one I mean. But You will do as well as anything.

I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get through it, please. Though maybe it's not our doing: I don't believe for an instant that what's going on out there is what You meant.

I have enough daily bread, so I won't waste time on that. It isn't the main problem. The problem is getting it down without choking on it.

Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

I suppose I should say I forgive whoever did this, and whatever they're doing now. I'll try, but it isn't easy.

Temptation comes next. At the Center, temptation was anything much more than eating and sleeping. Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you, Aunt Lydia used to say.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

I think about the chandelier too much, though it's gone now. But you could use a hook, in the closet. I've considered the possibilities. All you'd have to do, after attaching yourself, would be to lean your weight forward and not fight.

Deliver us from evil.

Then there's Kingdom, power, and glory. It takes a lot to believe in those right now. But I'll try it anyway. In Hope, as they say on the gravestones.

You must feel pretty ripped off. I guess it's not the first time.

If I were You I'd be fed up. I'd really be sick of it. I guess that's the difference between us.

I feel very unreal talking to You like this. I fee as if I'm talking to a wall. I wish You'd answer. I feel so alone.

All alone by the telephone. Except that I can't use the telephone. And if I could, who could I call?

Oh God. It's no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I have enough daily bread, so I won't waste time on that. It isn't the main problem. The problem is getting it down without choking on it.

Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe.

Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”
― Margaret Atwood

“What we prayed for was emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and babies.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“There was a certain power in it, silence and stllness.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“Are You, then the God of white people, and if we who are brown worship You, do we receive Your blessings as white men do?”
― F. Sionil José, Dusk

“I pray that You be not white, that You be without color and that You be in all men because goodness cannot be encased only in white.”
― F. Sionil José, Dusk

“I knew long ago that their blood is the same as mine. No stranger can come battering down my door and say he brings me light. This I have within me.”
― F. Sionil José, Dusk

“The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.”
― F. Sionil José, Ermita

“A nation which has people who can think, that nation already has strength. It is the mind which rules, Eustaquio -- not instinct or habit.”
― F. Sionil José, Dusk

“The greatest criminals are also the wealthiest men.”
― F. Sionil José, Dusk

“Yes, we too are stardust.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“...if ever consciously directs his prayers "Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be", our situation is, for the moment, desperate.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“In avoiding this situation -- this real nakedness of the soul in prayer -- you will be helped by the fact that the humans themselves do not desire it as much as they suppose.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“...in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“He cannot ravish; He can only woo.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs--to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be.”
― C.s Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“...the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“...the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted. But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple things "properly" -- because her "properly" conceals an insatiable demand for the exact, and almost impossible, palatial pleasures which she imagines she remembers from the past; a past described by her as "the days when you could get good servants" but known to us as the days when her senses were more easily pleased and she had pleasures of other kinds which made her less dependent on those of the table.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“You and I aren't going to spend our lives together," ... "But I finally understand that that doesn't take away any of the beauty of the fact that we were right for each other once.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Train Stories: Twelve Stories of Trains and Graffiti