Austen > Austen's Quotes

“What made me feel 'real?' When Errol tied my glove on for me or poured water in my mouth, or when I tripped over the jump rope and had to begin again. I felt real when I asked for help, when I failed, when I was myself. I did not want to become a real man, I realized. I was fighting for something better.”
― Thomas Page McBee, Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man

“Hey Meg! Communication implies sound. Communion doesn't.' He sent her a brief image of walking silently through the woods, the two of them alone together., their feet almost noiseless on the rusty carpet of pine needles. They walked without speaking, without touching, and yet they were as close as it is possible for two human beings to be. They climbed up through the woods, coming out into the brilliant sunlight at the top of the hill. A few sumac trees showed their rusty candles. Mountain laurel, shiny, so dark a green the leaves seemed black in the fierceness of sunlight, pressed toward the woods. Meg and Calvin had stretched out in the thick, late-summer grass, lying on their backs, gazing up into the shimmering blue of sky, a vault interrupted only by a few small clouds.

And she had been as happy, she remembered, as it is possible to be, and as close to Calvin as she had ever been to anybody in her life, even Charles Wallace, so close that their separate bodies, daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing them, seemed a single enjoyment of summer and sun and each other.

That was surely the purest kind of thing.

Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door

“Ecclesiastes calls you the All-powerful; the Maccabees call you the Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians calls you liberty; Baruch calls you Immensity; the Psalms call you Wisdom and Truth; John calls you Light; the Books of Kings call you Lord; Exodus calls you Providence; Leviticus, Sanctity; Esdras, Justice; the creation calls you God; man calls you Father; but Solomon calls you Compassion, and that is the most beautiful of all your names.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”
― Frederick Buechner

“when the imitation of Christ does not mean to live a life like Christ, but to live your life as authentically as Christ lived his, then there are many ways and forms in which a man can be a Christian.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

“The next time I found myself behind a woman running alone, I thought, I would do what I wished men had done for me: I would announce myself. 'Passing on your right!' I'd call. I would be careful to give her a wide berth. I would be aware that my body was, for much of the world, a weapon until proven otherwise. People sometimes think that being trans means I live 'between' worlds, but that's not exactly true. If anything, it has just created within me a potential for empathy that I must work every day, like a muscle, to grow.”
― Thomas Page McBee, Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man

“Though it was a relief to no longer experience a rebellion at the sight of my own face, moving through the world in my Before body had grooved my brain, and operating as if that weren't so--as if those grooves had instead been worn by thousands of wet towel snaps and gay jokes--felt as dissonant as looking in the mirror had once been. There was no language to describe my whole self that didn't put me in danger. I passed in that I allowed others to believe I had sprung, fully formed, into the man that stood before them. Passing is, after all, a social phenomenon. I did not 'pass' when I looked at myself, but I passed when others prescribed to me a boyhood I'd never had. I passed as the man others saw, and I did not dissuade them of their vision of me. I was, like everyone, passing as my most coherent translation. It was a blanket of familiarity that I put over myself, and it kept me safe.”
― Thomas Page McBee, Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man

“But charting our identities along a line in two dimensions has its limitations; namely, it doesn't accurately reflect the human diversity we observe. We don't see each other, or ourselves, in only two dimensions, and bisexual and nonbinary advocates are suggesting that it's long past time to update our ideology. Perhaps, instead of insisting that each person can be charted along a line, we should be looking up and seeing the multitude of sexualities and gender identities that exist in 3D, sprinkled through space like the stars.”
― Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible & the Lives of Transgender Christians

“The thing is, we can't be in right relationship to each other if we can't see each other. We can't be fully present in any relationship if we're walling off part of ourselves or hiding beneath a mask.”
― Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible & the Lives of Transgender Christians

“When we look at stories of renaming in the Bible, we often find that a character is handed a new name they never asked for. While I'm sure Abraham treasured the new name and promise God gave him, and while Peter probably felt honored in the moment Jesus proclaimed him the bedrock of the church, not everybody comes by their new name so easily. Some people have to fight for it.”
― Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible & the Lives of Transgender Christians

“What God was giving the eunuchs, through Isaiah's proclamation, was not just a place in society, and not just hope for a future. By giving the eunuchs the same kinds of gifts given to Abraham and Sarah--a name, legacy, family, acceptance, and blessing--God was consciously associating the two stories in the minds of the people. God was giving the eunuchs a story to connect to--a story that set a president, grounded in divine grace. That was the story I needed to hear. I needed to know that my problems were like the eunuch's problems, which were like Abraham and Sarah's problems, and that all of these complications were overcome by God's great love.”
― Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible & the Lives of Transgender Christians

“It might seem daunting to a congregation to have to learn about pronouns, or to designate a bathroom gender-neutral, or to have difficult conversations about what it means to affirm LGBTQ+ identities. But transgender people are not a burden for Christianity, or for the church. They come bearing gifts!”
― Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible & the Lives of Transgender Christians

“...If Jesus came to bring abundant life to all who follow him, that means that transgender Christians should be able to stop spending every single bit of their energy defending themselves against those 'clobber passages,' in order to concentrate instead on becoming better disciples. We should be able to move from survival practices to thriving faith. Jesus didn't come to make things marginally more bearable. He came to give us abundant and eternal life.”
― Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible & the Lives of Transgender Christians

“There are two ways to interpret what Paul says in Galatians 3:28 about our being one in Christ: either it means that we're all whitewashed and homogenized and our differences are erased... or it means that we're called to find a way to make our different identities fit together, like the bright shards in assorted colors that make up the stained glass windows of a cathedral. Are we called to sameness, or are we called to oneness?”
― Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible & the Lives of Transgender Christians

“If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?" Hillel's questions confront us with the uncomfortable fact that, trans or nontrans, we all have to become ourselves--not just once, by growing from childhood into adulthood, but throughout our lives... "If I am not for myself, who will be?" Hillel didn't have to know anything about transsexuality to know that the answer to that is "no one." No one expected me, needed me, or even wanted me to become myself. In fact, my family clearly needed me not to become myself. My journey toward becoming a person could begin only with the radical act of being-for-myself suggested by Hillel's question. Being-for-myself seemed selfish, solipsistic, even psychotic, for I would have to be for a self that didn't yet exist. But Hillel showed me, in the plainest possible terms, that if I wasn't for myself, my self would never be. Hillel's first question leads inexorably to his second: being for myself was only the first step toward becoming a person, because "If I am for myself alone, what am I?"... Hillel's question is more than a call to come out of the closet. It is also a demand that we take responsibility for the consequences to others of our becoming. If I am not, cannot be, for myself alone, if I need others to become myself, then I cannot ignore the pain that results from my becoming. However much I've suffered, my self and my life are no more important than the suffering selves and shattered lives of those whose destinies are tangled with mine. People I love are in anguish as a consequence of my transition, and, unless I acknowledge that that anguish is as real as the anguish that drove me to transition, I will be for myself alone... For most of my life, I tried to be for others without being for myself--to be the man they needed me to be, to suppress and deny the woman I felt I was. Once I began to transition, I wanted desperately to do the opposite, to insist that, after all the years of self-denial I had given them, their feelings didn't matter, to demand that they embrace and support the miraculous, cataclysmic process of my transition from death to life. Hillel's question forced me to recognize that to become a person, a real person and not someone acting like a woman, I had to be both for myself and for others, to be as true, as compassionate, as present to my family and friends as I was to myself.”
― Joy Ladin, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders