Tori > Tori's Quotes

“The four rules of writing... 1. Write to discover. 2. There is no greater discovery than love. 3. All love comes from the Creator. 4. Write what you will.”
― Ted Dekker, Showdown

“You never read Spider-Man? Accepting your true identity means understanding that you are a stranger to this world. A freak, ostracized by the very people you want to help.”
― Ted Dekker, Saint

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I mean, what's better than having the person you love love you?
That's pretty exciting. It's pretty amazing, actually.

It's like a miracle or something…”
― Aya Nakahara, Love★Com, Vol. 5

“I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Turn to the light. Don't fear the shadow it creates.”
― Ted Dekker

“The world’s bumper sticker reads: Life sucks, and then you die. Perhaps Christian bumper stickers should read: Life sucks, but then you find hope and you can’t wait to die.”
― Ted Dekker, The Slumber of Christianity: Awakening a Passion for Heaven on Earth

“There's a word for it," she told me, "in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explodes and lights up the smoke from the ones before it."
"That's a terrible word," I teased. "It's like an excuse for holding onto the past."
"Well, I think it's beautiful. A word for remembering small moments destined to be lost.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“It is a risk to love.
What if it doesn't work out?
Ah, but what if it does.”
― Peter McWilliams

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Home is behind, the world ahead,
and there are many paths to tread
through shadows to the edge of night,
until the stars are all alight.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don't belong.”
― Mandy Hale

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I think we ought to live happily ever after.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“I hope your bacon burns.”
― Diana Wynne Jones , Howl’s Moving Castle

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’
What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!”
― Barbara Alice Mann

“Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.”
― Oscar Wilde, Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde: The Young King/The Remarkable Rocket

“There’s different ways to be impacted by truth. One is to read the scriptures. Another is to read other works by other people who have read the scriptures, non fiction for example. Another is to do studies. Another is to go to a place of worship. Another thing is to sit and listen to someone who’s speaking. There’s all kinds of ways. Another way is to write. About the truth. Discover the struggle through your character.”
― Ted Dekker

“In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they're still beautiful.”
― Alice Walker

“Being complicit only requires a muted response in the face of injustice or uncritical support of the status quo.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Jumping ahead to the victories means skipping the hard but necessary work of examining what went wrong with race and the church.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“It's nothing short of astonishing that a religious tradition with this relentless emphasis on salvation and one so hyperattuned to personal sin can simultaneously maintain such blindness to social sins swirling about it, such as slavery and race-based segregation and bigotry.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“But if we white Christians are going to get any critical leverage on our past, and the distortions this past has brought into our present, we have to let go of both the quest for self-protection—that is to say, the advantages we hoard at unjust costs to others—and the insistence on our racial and religious innocence.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“Christian complicity with racism in the twenty-first century looks different than complicity with racism in the past. It looks like Christians responding to 'black lives matter' with the phrase 'all lives matter.' It looks like Christians consistently supporting a president whose racism has been on display for decades. It looks like Christians telling black people and their allies that their attempts to bring up racial concerns are 'divisive.' It looks conversations on race that focus on individual relationships and are unwilling to discuss systemic solutions. Perhaps Christian complicity in racism has not changed after all. Although the characters and the specifics are new, many of the same rationalizations for racism remain.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“If discipleship practices offer the means to lead us from segregation to solidarity, lament provides the mood. We dare not come to this ministry of reconciliation with any other posture. We move forward humbly, as those only slowly awakening to the extent of the damage done by our previously defective discipleship. The road ahead will often feel unnatural to those of us who’ve been discipled in the narrative of racial difference. For those who’ve known only racial privilege, the journey toward equitable reconciliation will sting at times. We are accustomed to segregation, novices on this journey to solidarity. And so we must practice.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Given the individualism that is endemic to much of white Christianity, it will be important to regularly teach the communal nature of the Lord’s Supper. If we are to be shaped toward solidarity by the Communion meal, this note will need to be sounded more clearly by preachers and teachers.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity