Booked Quotes

“Books have formed the soul of me. I know that spiritual formation is of God, but I also know—mainly because I learned it from books—that there are other kinds of formation, too, everyday gifts, and that God uses the things of this earth to teach us and shape us, and to help us find truth.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“It is no coincidence that the term “voice” has come to mean in modern usage much more than just the sound made by the vocal organs, but also the means by which we make our individual selves known, not only to others but to ourselves. For the connection between the self and language is inseparable: it is through language that the self becomes.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“In so doing, I resisted the descent into what the school counselors called low self-esteem. Self-esteem is the dark, distorted shadow of self-possession. Self-esteem gazes inward and wills the inner eye to like what it sees; self-possession looks inward only long enough to take a measure then looks outward at the world in search of a fitting place—and settles for no less.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“From that moment, and for the rest of my life, my mother's words--perceptive and many others--have helped me to be the thing she saw and named in me.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“God who spoke the world into existence with words is, in fact, the source of meaning of all words. My journey toward that discovery is the story of this book. I thought my love of books was taking me away from God, but as it turns out, book were the backwoods path back to God, bramble-filled and broken, yes, but full of truth and wonder.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“My struggle against God's ways only reinforced my belief in him. After all, one doesn't struggle against something one doesn't believe in. One doesn't rail against someone one thinks does not exist.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Freedom is not an endless sea of choices, but an acceptance, embrace even, of both the nature and the grace at the core of our being and our becoming.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Thomas Merton says, “Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice out there calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice in here calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Jane exerts what little control she has as an otherwise politically and socially powerless woman of no means through her voice of sensitivity and longing and sharp wit. As she finds her voice, Jane’s journey to selfhood is assisted by her resisting the natural temptation to become like the people whose love she desires but does not receive. She refuses to become like her cruel aunt or her tyrannical cousin John or her spoiled girl cousins. Yet, at the same time, like any little child, she wishes to be loved by them.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“I struggled against God. Not as many do. But still I did, in my own way. I didn't doubt his being. I doubted his ways. I doubted that his ways were better than my ways.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“The more I thought about it, the more I realized that reading—that is, really reading, interpreting—literature is practice for reading and interpreting life. The more one practices, the better one gets.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Knowing oneself has tremendous importance for all of the major decisions one might make. Making life choices that are in line with who one is – who one was created to be – leads to a more fulfilling life. I know that 'self-fulfillment' has become a dirty word for those who rightly understand that life is not 'all about me,' but about a greater purpose. This is true. At the same time, each of us is created as a unique individual with unique gifts, talents, and callings that were designed for a purpose. Self-fulfillment doesn't necessarily mean selfish fulfillment. It can mean fulfillment of all that one was created to be. The satisfaction one feels at having achieved one's rightful desires is no more selfish or wrong a thing than the satisfaction of the apple tree in bringing forth the fruit it was designed to bear.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“...For much of my life I loved books more than God, never discovering for a long, long time that a God who spoke the world into existence with words is, in fact, the source of meaning of all words. My journey toward that discovery is the story of this book. I thought my love of books was taking me away from God, but as it turns out, books were the backwoods path to God, bramble-filled and broken, yes, but full of truth and wonder.”
― karen swallow prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“It’s true of most couples, I suspect, particularly of young ones like us in the fresh stage of love as we were to fool ourselves and the other into being what we think—often mistakenly—the other wants us to be, or even more likely, what we think we should be to and for the other person.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Brontë was attempting to depict a character that adheres to the unchanging principles of her faith though she refused conformity to the particular practices of her society. Doctrine and practice, unfortunately, don’t always neatly coincide. At this point in the book, Jane—like me, an alien and pilgrim—demonstrates her possession of true freedom: the freedom to be true to the self she knows she has been created to be.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“When my youth group leader told all of the kids in youth group that he had burned all of his rock albums, and I happened to listen to rock music, I saw two choices before me: either to burn all my albums, too, or to keep listening but not talk about it in church on Sunday or with any of my Sunday friends. I chose the latter, not seeing a third option of voicing disagreement or engaging in further discussion. My choice made it more difficult to share my Sunday life with my non-Sunday friends and therefore only fortified the partitions that chopped my life into bits. A subtle divide easily becomes a rigid compartmentalization, a post office mouth that communicates different selves in different spheres.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“I believe in a God who not only intervenes in human affairs--again and again--but one who also makes banquets out of stale bread.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Besides, we were fifteen, and we couldn't get our feelings to match up with our brains. So we went with our feelings.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Milton puts it most profoundly when he says, Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. In other words, the power of truth lies not in abstract propositions but in the understanding and willful application of truth by living, breathing persons which can occur only in the context of liberty.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Nothing defined the latter half of England's Victorian age more than the way in which Darwin's claims shook the collective faith of Victorian society. The cataclysmic effect of Darwin's ideas on his society is described by historians as a crisis of faith that turned the once-hopeful period into an "age of anxiety" and an "age of doubt." The years surrounding the publication of Darwin's work are the narrow gate through which the age of belief passed into the age of unbelief, not only for England but for the entire Western world within the shockingly brief period of one generation.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“If the right book can save your soul, then perhaps the wrong ones can damn it.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“I mistook non-conformity for freedom and in so doing found myself anything but free. For it is in conformity to one's true nature that one is most becoming, in both senses of the word: well-fitted and beautiful.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Discovering truth is a process that occurs over time, more fully with each idea or book that gets added to the equation. Sure, many of the books I read in my youth filled my head with silly notions and downright lies that I mistook for truth, but only until I read something else that exposed the lie for what it was.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me