Beth > Beth's Quotes

“Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Destroying things is much easier than making them.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“Not my daughter, you bitch!”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Stupid people are dangerous.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“Some people say, “Never let them see you cry.” I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew - and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents - that there was all the difference in the world.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The logic of cross and resurrection, of the new creation which gives shape to all truly Christian living, points in a different direction. And one of the central names for that direction is joy: the joy of relationships healed as well as enhanced, the joy of belonging to the new creation, of finding not what we already had but what god was longing to give us.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Christian

“Childhood is a branch of cartography.”
― Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

“Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but he is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“I guess Faulkner never would have written anything like this, huh? Oh, well.”
― Stephen King

“The world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Any father…must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, "Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I'd multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring