Erin Bottger (Bouma)

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

“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

“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

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