Tim

“Suffering opens up ancient places of pain that had been hidden. It exposes frightening experiences that had been repressed, shameful wrongs that had been committed. It spurs some people to painfully and carefully examine the basement of their own soul. But it also presents the pleasurable sensation that one is getting closer to the truth. The pleasure in suffering is that you feel you are getting beneath the superficial and approaching the fundamental.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“When most people think about the future, they dream up ways they might live happier lives. But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don’t usually talk about happiness. It is usually the ordeals that seem most significant. Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“maybe we are collectively in the second stage of grieving our loss of cultural significance as the church in North America. The first phase was denial, in which we rejected the evidence of declining church attendance and cultural marginalization—a few Pollyannas are still in this first phase of grief. Many of us have now moved to the second phase: anger.”
― Skye Jethani, What If Jesus Was Serious?: A Visual Guide to the Teachings of Jesus We Love to Ignore

“In a conceptual sense, every virus is a professional gene carrier. Viruses have a simple structure: they are often no more than a set of genes wrapped inside a coat—a “piece of bad news wrapped in a protein coat,” as Peter Medawar, the immunologist, had described them. When a virus enters a cell, it sheds its coat, and begins to use the cell as a factory to copy its genes, and manufacture new coats, resulting in millions of new viruses budding out of the cell. Viruses have thus distilled their life cycle to its bare essentials. They live to infect and reproduce; they infect and reproduce to live.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History