Erin Bottger (Bouma) > Erin's Quotes

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.”
― Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever

“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”
― Maurice Sendak

“I have always loved a window, especially an open one.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Labyrinth

“Yours is the light by which my spirit's born: - you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.”
― E.E. Cummings

“GENERAL GRANT: "There is only one way to make war, Colonel. You have to HURT somebody. Maybe you have to hurt EVERYBODY. Make them feel it, understand what it is we are doing out here. If this was worth fighting in the first place, then it is worth winning. We cannot win unless we fight. If we fight, men will die. If more of THEM die, then we will win. It has nothing to do with cities, or government, or what is barbaric and what is civilized. We are HERE, and the enemy ois over there, and we must give the newspapers the horrifying truth, then the people will know. If Mr. Lincoln does not want me to win this war, then he can make that decision. But there is no other way to see it. If these men do not fight and bleed and die, if we do not make the rebels quit by destroying their will to fight, by destroying their army, then the only other choice is to walk away.”
― Jeff Shaara

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The constant happiness is curiosity.”
― Alice Munro

“Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.”
― Angela Carter

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
― Albert Einstein

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Thought is an acid, eating us away. At first we imagine it will only eat into that which is rotten and sick and must be removed. But thought thinks otherwise. It eats blindly. It begins with the prey you most gladly throw to it - but don't imagine it will be content with that! It doesn't stop until it has gnawed away the last thing you hold dear.”
― Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

“I remember a young man coming to see me when he had just left school and begun work in London. He had given up going to church, he said, because he could not say the creed without feeling that he was a hypocrite. He no longer believed it. When he had finished telling me what he thought, I said to him, ‘If I were to answer your problems to your complete intellectual satisfaction, would you be willing to change the way you live?’ He smiled slightly and blushed. The answer was clearly ‘No’. His real problem was not intellectual but moral. This, then, is the spirit in which our search must be conducted. We must set aside apathy, pride, prejudice and sin, and seek God – no matter what the consequences. Of all these hindrances to the search for truth, the last two are the hardest to overcome: intellectual prejudice and moral self-will. The reason is that both are expressions of fear – and fear is the greatest enemy of the truth.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“Within the pages of books, I've journeyed to Mandalay, the Milky Way and Santa Fe.”
― Kevin Ansbro

“Wholeness is the goal [of life], but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”
― Parker J. Palmer, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

“dokhodyaga, a ‘goner’ in Gulag-speak, one of the soon-to-be-dead, emaciated”
― Katherine Brabon, The Memory Artist

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself . . . You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
― Angela Carter

“The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.”
― Vaclav Havel

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“The old rules no longer applied but new ones were not yet clearly defined, leaving those with authority or power to determine what was acceptable.”
― Kenneth Maher, Wind of Change: An American Journey in Post-Soviet Russia