“Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.”
-Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
“It isn’t about reading the words [with books]; it’s about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-color prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.”
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
-Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan.
“Duty can pack an adequate sack lunch, but love may decide to enclose a little love note inside… Obligation sends the children to bed on time, but loves tucks the covers in around their necks and passes out kisses and hugs (even to teenagers!)… Duty gets offended quickly if it isn’t appreciated, but love learns to laugh a lot and to work for the sheer joy of doing it. Obligation can pour a little glass of milk, but quite often, love adds a little chocolate.“
-Linda Andersen, Love Adds a Little Chocolate
“Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives, is the perfect preparation for the future only He can see.”
-Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place
“…If we had locked ourselves in a prison of failure and self-pity we were the only jailers… We had the only key to our freedom.”
-Og Mandine, quoting lessons learned from Simon Potter, The Greatest Miracle on Earth
“Too late, I found, you can’t wait to become perfect. You got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.”
-Charles Halloway in Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
-Mark Twain
Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain, A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Source).
“We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort.
“And that is why we write.”
-Neil Gaiman, Newbery Medal acceptance speech for The Graveyard Book at the annual conference of the American Library Association in Chicago, July 12, 2009.
“Love is not the admiration of perfection, but the acceptance of an imperfect person with all his imperfections, because loving and accepting him makes us better and stronger.”
-Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (147).
