max theodore’s Reviews > Go Tell It on the Mountain > Status Update

elizabethi love you so so much

really great how this book is like "your parents and all the adults in your life are the main characters of complex and painful stories you know nothing about, and also your dad sucks in his story too"

this didn't win the poll but i must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul #dictatorship. anyway the first paragraph of this book is such an impossibly good opening. gives you everything you need right away

"You still promising the Lord you going to do better--and you think whatever you done already, whatever you doing right at that minute, don't count. Of all the men I ever knew, you's the man who ought to be hoping the Bible's all a lie--'cause if that trumpet ever sounds, you going to spend eternity talking."

did people lose their fucking minds in 1953 when this book came out. i wouldve

"Not even tonight, in the heart's nearly impenetrable secret place, where hte truth is hidden and where only the truth can live, could she wish that she had not known him; or deny that, so long as he was there, the rejoicing of Heaven could have meant nothing to her--that, being forced to choose between Richard and God, she could only, even with weeping, have turned away from God."

pooh floating in the dark dot gif

"Either he arose from this theater, never to return, putting behind him the world and its pleasures, its honors, and its glories, or he remained here with the wicked and partook of their certain punishment. Yes, it was a narrow way--and John stirred in his seat, not daring to feel it God's injustice that he must make so cruel a choice."

"Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real. He did not feel it himself, the joy they felt, yet he could not doubt that it was, for them, the very bread of life--could not doubt it, that is, until it was too late to doubt."

ok. already feeling real normal about this one