Atonement Quotes

“I want to try making things right because picking up the pieces is way better than leaving them the way they are.”
― Simone Elkeles, Perfect Chemistry

“I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”
― Nelson Mandela

“He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“I’ll wait for you. Come back.
The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now.
It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion.
Waiting.
Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual.
It was difficult to come back.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“So let me get this straight. You left this ‘fabulous job’ as you put it, so you could be a dog-sitter in Fort Langley?”
― Alyssa Hall, And Then I Heard the Quiet

“I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.”
― Lillian Hellman, The Children's Hour

“Dearest Cecilia, the story can resume. The one I had been planning on that evening walk. I can become again the man who once crossed the surrey park at dusk, in my best suit, swaggering on the promise of life. The man who, with the clarity of passion, made love to you in the library. The story can resume. I will return. Find you, love you, marry you and live without shame.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Sometimes we carry unhappy feelings about past hurts too long. We spend too much energy dwelling on things that have passed and cannot be changed. We struggle to close the door and let go of the hurt. If, after time, we can forgive whatever may have caused the hurt, we will tap 'into a life-giving source of comfort' through the Atonement, and the 'sweet peace' of forgiveness will be ours ("My Journey to Forgiving," Ensign, Feb. 1997. 43). Some injuries are so hurtful and deep that healing comes only with help from a higher power and hope for perfect justice and restitution in the next life. . . . You can tap into that higher power and receive precious comfort and sweet peace.”
― James E. Faust

“Sometimes you're not ready to give the world quite what it wants. And that's okay, because the Earth is generously patient.”
― Jaree Francis

“The healing power of charity, bestowed by our Father and made possible by the Atonement of Jesus Christ, can make it virtually impossible for us even to feel emotions common to the natural man.”
― Sheri L. Dew, If Life Were Easy, It Wouldn't Be Hard: And Other Reassuring Truths

“Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“It wasn't a potential atonement actuated by the sinner, it was an actual atonement initiated by the savior.”
― John MacArthur

“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.”
― W.H. Auden

“And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“In Him we have . . . the forgiveness of sins . . . —Ephesians 1:7

Beware of the pleasant view of the fatherhood of God: God is so kind and loving that of course He will forgive us. That thought, based solely on emotion, cannot be found anywhere in the New Testament. The only basis on which God can forgive us is the tremendous tragedy of the Cross of Christ. To base our forgiveness on any other ground is unconscious blasphemy. The only ground on which God can forgive our sin and reinstate us to His favor is through the Cross of Christ. There is no other way! Forgiveness, which is so easy for us to accept, cost the agony at Calvary. We should never take the forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and our sanctification in simple faith, and then forget the enormous cost to God that made all of this ours.

Forgiveness is the divine miracle of grace. The cost to God was the Cross of Christ. To forgive sin, while remaining a holy God, this price had to be paid. Never accept a view of the fatherhood of God if it blots out the atonement. The revealed truth of God is that without the atonement He cannot forgive— He would contradict His nature if He did. The only way we can be forgiven is by being brought back to God through the atonement of the Cross. God’s forgiveness is possible only in the supernatural realm.

Compared with the miracle of the forgiveness of sin, the experience of sanctification is small. Sanctification is simply the wonderful expression or evidence of the forgiveness of sins in a human life. But the thing that awakens the deepest fountain of gratitude in a human being is that God has forgiven his sin. Paul never got away from this. Once you realize all that it cost God to forgive you, you will be held as in a vise, constrained by the love of God.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

“His laws once broken, His justice and the very nature of those laws bring the immutable retribution; but if we turn penitently to Him, He enables us to bear our punishment with a meek and docile heart, ‘for His mercy endureth forever.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell

“Man cannot measure the bounds nor fathom the depths of divine forgiveness...”
― James Talmage

“It’s when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I’d assassinated, that I unravel inside.”
― Cheyenne McCray, The First Sin

“The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“The priest rose to take up the crucifix; at that, she strained her neck forward like someone who is thirsty, and, pressing her lips to the body of the Man-God, she laid upon it with all her expiring strength the most passionate kiss of love she had ever given. Then he recited the Miserateur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began he unctions: first on the eyes, which had so coveted all earthly splendors; then on the nostrils, greedy for mild breezes and the smells of love; then on the mouth, which had opened to utter lies, which had moaned with pride and cried out in lust; then on the hands, which had delighted in the touch of smooth material; and lastly on the soles of the feet, once so quick when she hastened to satiate her desires and which now would never walk again.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Jesus came to be with the Father for an interlude before his betrayal, but found hell rather than heaven opened before him, and he staggered.”
― William Lane, The Gospel of Mark

“Tim looked my way again. "And how to you think you will be judged, on the day the trumpet sounds? You who have caused so much pain, so many deaths."
"I have been true to Him. I have stood up for His name when all around me ---"
"For His name," Tim said. "But what of what He taught? What of the innocents you have killed in His name?"
"I've only known one miraculous innocent," Father Peter said.
"And you've spent your lifetimes trying to atone for your betrayal, to protect his memory. A memory that doesn't need your protection."
"You're not going to change my mind."
"I know," Tim said. His voice was sad.”
― Robert J. Wiersema

“It is awe-inspiring and faith promoting to walk WHERE Jesus walked; however, more important is that we walk AS Jesus walked.”
― Dr. Trina Boice

“Did she honestly think she had the power to atone for someone else's sins, that she could exact justice with her wit, her superior thinking? People born of privilege are sometimes thus confused.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“Yet, apocalypse also implies judgment, a necessary exposure of the lies we’ve inherited and lived by. Atonement is not always soft—it burns that which needs to die but wishes to cling on. The only way to kill shame is to hang it publicly.”
― Paule Patterson, The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening: Reclaiming Eschatology & Atonement During a Convergence of Globalization, Nihilism, Science, & Spirituality

“We’re not awaiting a divine invasion. We’re being invited into incarnation. Endings are always beginnings, and atonement an eschaton”
― Paule Patterson, The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening: Reclaiming Eschatology & Atonement During a Convergence of Globalization, Nihilism, Science, & Spirituality

“This book was written in the conviction that what Jesus named as ‘the coming of the Son of Man’ was never meant to be a prophecy of future spectacle or predetermined judgment, but a functional reality all humans will wrestle with and a call to conscious participation in divine reality—through ego death, inner transformation, and the reconciliation of all things.”
― Paule Patterson, The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening: Reclaiming Eschatology & Atonement During a Convergence of Globalization, Nihilism, Science, & Spirituality

“If the first Adam was formed from dust, and the second conceived of Spirit and born of woman, then the coming of the Son of Man signals something even more radical: a third Adam… Not a new individual, but the emergence of a collective humanity, transfigured.”
― Paule Patterson, The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening: Reclaiming Eschatology & Atonement During a Convergence of Globalization, Nihilism, Science, & Spirituality

“You can’t blame yourself for everything,” Thadred said.

“No. This whole thing is the result of dozens, perhaps hundreds of decisions made by all of us. But it will take all of us now to undo it.”
― Elisabeth Wheatley, Daindreth's Empress