Heather Davis > Heather's Quotes

“America is a young country, young and brash and prone to errors. Like teenagers. For all our inherent goodness, we’ve been cursed with bright, shiny object disease and we don’t want a cure. Not now. Not till we get our little taste, till our kids get theirs.”
― Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives

“In our post-everything culture, obey has become a four-letter word. Obeying is for wimps. Obeying is for people who didn’t do well enough on their SATs to write their own rules. Only the weak and the feeble and the young—-well, not even the young anymore—-need to obey. Funny, because the root of the word obey is from the French verb meaning “to listen, or to give ear to.” It was never intended as a militant word, but one of hearing, of understanding. Of getting it. For a world obsessed with staying in constant communication, we aren’t really very good listeners.”
― Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives

“Did you notice there aren’t any average kids anymore—only Gifted and Disposable?”
― Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives

“When God says hold up, wait, pray, it’s not your time yet, our entire bodies rebel, legs kicking and flailing like some overturned dung beetle certain that if we try hard enough we might be able to gain a little traction on our own”
― Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives

“Even if we’ve never been inside a synagogue or a mosque or a church—even if we have, and vowed never to go back—deep down in our striving hearts, beneath all the ambition and the fear, we suspect that we were made for a different sort of life.”
― Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives

“The attempt to prevent our kids from struggling for fear it might scar their permanent records is, instead, scarring them for life.”
― Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives

“We love Christmas presents but not Christ; Easter baskets but not crosses. We want to tell our friends with cancer that we will pray for them (we don’t) and our puddle-eyed children that their goldfish have gone to heaven (doubtful). When we lose our jobs we want to take comfort in the idea that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle, but really, how can we? We have absolutely no idea what God has given us or what it might be for. We haven’t talked to Him in ages.”
― Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives

“Our own egos are so fragile we cannot bear to give our lives to the raising of children only to have them become ordinary people. There, I said it. The worst thing a 21st-century child of interesting parents could be: ordinary. Like us.”
― Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives

“We fluff them and fold them and nudge them and enhance them and bind them and break them and embellish them beyond measure; then, as we drive them up to the college interviews that they’ve heard since birth are the gateway to the lives they were destined to lead based on nothing more than our own need for it to be true, we tell them, with a smile so tight it would crack nuts, 'Just be yourself.”
― Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives

“I can’t hear God’s voice for my kids, but I can watch and listen and pray and adjust and try not to screw up whatever He has planned for their lives. And although I can’t make them listen to God, or even want to, I can plant enough seeds to swing the world in their favor. That said, as I navigate my day surrounded by the parents of gifted children (did you notice there aren’t any average kids anymore—only Gifted and Disposable), here’s where I get confused: if a person believes in gifts but not in God, then where—as they stand in daily admiration of their child’s emergent uniqueness, their heart swelling with pride and joy and, yes, gratitude —where, then, do they send the thank-you note?”
― Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“It's the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it.”
― Frank Warren

“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.”
― Marshall McLuhan