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Jon
https://www.goodreads.com/pennkenobi
“Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes – and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away and he that sits upon the throne will say, ‘Behold, I make all things new.”
― The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
― The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
“Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen.”
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“It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another?”
― The End of the Affair
― The End of the Affair
“There are not many road signs in Russia, you know.’ He laughed. ‘If you don’t know where the road goes, you shouldn’t be on it.'” — Arkady Renko from Gorky Park”
― Gorky Park
― Gorky Park
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”
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The Inklings
— 512 members
— last activity Jan 31, 2026 09:09AM
The Inklings was an informal literary discussion group associated with the University of Oxford, England, between the 1930s and the 1960s. Its most re ...more
Jon’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jon’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
338 books
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158 friends
2,268 books
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2,428 friends
73 books
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33 friends
743 books
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38 friends
199 books
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34 friends
128 books
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174 friends
773 books
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40 friends
309 books
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252 friends
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