Quotes by Bloggers - Page 9

A lot of people don't like me. I take that as evidence that I have done something beautifully different or something extraordinary.

Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.

By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of the church community, we form, and shape, and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real world, flesh and blood, face-to-face relationships?

Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it's a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove "my friend" before offering to sell him a watch.

Or that time she made a snowman in Britt-Marie and Kent’s garden right under their balcony and dressed it up in grown-up clothes so it looked as if a person had fallen from the roof.

When you fail to tap into your wellsprings of inner strength due totoxic habits, environments or people, you wind up feeling trapped, stranded and unhappy. You end up in soulless jobs, destructive relationships and empty friendships. Most of all, youfind yourself unsatisfied with who you are, and you often become your own worst enemy,perpetuating the cycles of pain, anger and fear within you – like I did

Why fantasize about what you already experience? I go to the written word for places and faces that I don't get at home. Hot people in hot climates. Sex acts I can hardly imagine. Porn is about the unachievable ... and, therefore, the inherently desirable.

She began sobbing again. “I’m not ready to die.

In the beginning the queen had been a courageous and fair-minded princess very much liked by all, but unfortunately she grew up and became a frightened adult, as adults tend to be. She started loving efficiency and avoiding conflict. As adults do.

Authors need readers and not followers. Authors need review and not Likes!

I would argue that healthy doubt (questioning one's beliefs) is perhaps the best defense against unhealthy doubt (questioning God). When we know how to make a distinction between our ideas about God and God himself, our faith remains safe when one of those ideas is seriously challenged.

Unlike the ancients, modern man does not see Mother Earth as some kind of goddess like Gaia, the ancestral mother of all life in Greek mythology. He has de–mythicized her, reduced her to an object, a specimen, to be studied by scientists and exploited by corporations for profit.

Bittersweet? No, just bitter, the taste of your tongue.Words you can’t have back, so they linger.

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.Visiting Kathy's grave was the less dramatic of the two.

The beauty of traveling solo is that you wonder unexpectedly, but almost certainly into the direction you were meant to go.

We always want to hold on tight to those we love; but if we intend to keep those we love, we must let go every once in awhile.

Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.

Everything we think we know, everything we think we see, everything we believe we feel, taste, smell, or hear, everything we “remember” (our pasts), everything we want to happen (our futures), everything that has ever existed or will ever exist, only exists right now. All of these things are nothing more than electric signals being passed through our brains and bodies, right now. It is all energy flowing through us right now. “The past” exists only in our minds. We are the ones who bring it into reality. We are the ones who bring it into the present. We are the ones who make it “real”.

How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes".And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency

There is not a corner of this world that God has abandoned.

Christian productivity is unique. Most productivity gurus will encourage you to be as selfish as you need to be, to get rid of anything that doesn’t interest or excite you. But as a Christian you know you can do things that do not perfectly fit your mission but still do them out of love for God and with a desire to glorify him.

Nothing in life is yours to keep—not your children, not your friends and family, not your lover, not your material possessions, not your youth and vitality, not your struggles (which is great news) or successes, not your body and not even your life. Everything in life is given to you for a short period of time, to enjoy, to learn from, to appreciate and to love, but never to keep.

Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.

Rocks in my path? I keep them all. With them I shall build my castle.

When we release all the negativity in our lives and notice the beauty all around us, we'll see what truly matters in life.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so wrapped up in someone that I saw only him, caring not a jot what onlookers might think. I ached with nostalgia for a younger, more responsive me, who seemed to feel things more intensely.

That’s what I’d ask you to do: Hope for peace. Because I know that I would love to be able to lay down my weapon and get to being a colonist. Just like you are. Just like I want to be.

Ove çould not in all honesty remember how it all started. It wasn't the sort of dispute where you did remember. It was more an argument where the little disagreements had ended up so entangled that every new word was treacherously booby-trapped, and in the end it wasn't possible to open one's mouth at all without setting off at least four unexploded mines from earlier conflicts. It was the sort of argument that had just run, and run, and run. Until one day it just ran out.

Every day is precious. You will never live THIS day again. It is ONE event in human history. Why not make it count? Time is a nonrenewable resource.

To teach her that not all monsters are in the beginning, and not all monsters look like monsters. Some carry their monstrosity inside.

I finished the [blog] post reflecting on the fact that, despite all the changes in my life, maybe I wasn't so different after all. If I typed it, maybe I could believe it, too.

I do not mind when you tell me what you want and put that first instead of last.

As a fantasist, I well understand the power of escapism, particularly as relates to romance. But when so many stories aimed at the same audience all trumpet the same message – And Lo! There shall be Two Hot Boys, one of them your Heart’s Intended, the other a vain Pretender who is also hot and with whom you shall have guilty makeouts before settling down with your One True Love – I am inclined to stop viewing the situation as benign and start wondering why, for instance, the heroines in these stories are only ever given a powerful, magical destiny of great importance to the entire world so long as fulfilling it requires male protection, guidance and companionship, and which comes to an end just as soon as they settle their inevitable differences with said swain and start kissing.I mean to invoke is something of the danger of mob rule, only applied to narrative and culture. Viz: that the comparative harmlessness of individuals does not prevent them from causing harm en masse. Take any one story with the structure mentioned above, and by itself, there’s no problem. But past a certain point, the numbers begin to tell – and that poses a tricky question. In the case of actual mobs, you’ll frequently find a ringleader, or at least a core set of agitators: belligerent louts who stir up feeling well beyond their ability to contain it. In the case of novels, however, things aren’t so clear cut. Authors tell the stories they want to tell, and even if a number of them choose to write a certain kind of narrative either in isolation or inspired by their fellows, holding any one of them accountable for the total outcome would be like trying to blame an avalanche on a single snowflake. Certainly, we may point at those with the greatest (arguable) influence or expostulate about creative domino effects, but as with the drop that breaks the levee, it is impossible to try and isolate the point at which a cluster of stories became a culture of stories – or, for that matter, to hold one particular narrative accountable for the whole.

States that are built on a religious foundation limit their own people in a circle of faith and fear.

A writer should be able to open a window or two for others to see the world and themselves in a new light. Anything less is just self–indulgence and intellectual masturbation.

But what might a woman say about church as she? What might a woman say about the church as body and bride? Perhaps she would speak of the way a regular body moves through the world—always changing, never perfect—capable of nurturing life, not simply through the womb, but through hands, feet, eyes, voice, and brain. Every part is sacred. Every part has a function. Perhaps she would speak of impossible expectations and all the time she’s wasted trying to contort herself into the shape of those amorphous silhouettes that flit from magazines and billboards into her mind. Or of this screwed-up notion of purity as a status, as something awarded by men with tests and checklists and the power to give it and take it away. Perhaps she would speak of the surprise of seeing herself—flaws and all—in the mirror on her wedding day. Or of the reality that with new life comes swollen breasts, dry heaves, dirty diapers, snotty noses, late-night arguments, and a whole army of new dangers and fears she never even considered before because life-giving isn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds, but it’s a thousand times more beautiful. Perhaps she would talk about being underestimated, about surprising people and surprising herself. Or about how there are moments when her own strength startles her, and moments when her weakness—her forgetfulness, her fear, her exhaustion—unnerve her. Maybe she would tell of the time, in the mountains with bare feet on the ground, she stood tall and wise and felt every cell in her body smile in assent as she inhaled and exhaled and in one loud second realized, I’m alive! I’m enfleshed! only to forget it the next. Or maybe she would explain how none of the categories created for her sum her up or capture her essence.

You say ‘cure.’ I hear ‘you’re not human enough.

When I visit someplace new my favorite thing to do is eat...and walk, preferable to a place where I can eat some more.

Mystery is what makes women, woman. A woman without mystery is no woman. She is a girl who has yet discovered the depths of her heart.

The ground keeps changing."He gave her arm a gentle pinch. "Do you still think this is a dream?""All dreams change," said Saffron. "That's how you know they're dreams.""So does reality," he replied. "That's how you know it's real.

God works through people by stirring their hearts and sometimes people never know how they are helping others.

To overcome the sadness of our hearts, we must remember the joys of our lives.

Trust your weapon, it is almost certainly smarter than you are. Remember this and you may yet live.

Cynicism may help us create simpler storylines with good guys and bad guys, but it doesn't make us any better at telling the truth, which is that most of us are a frightening mix of good and evil, sinner and saint.

Our greatest mistakes, if we look at them, and digest them, and interact with them, and learn from them… they can be the greatest moments of our lives.

The web is an opportunity for those who understand that the web is a threat.

Listen to Mr. Complacency long enough and he'll convince you that what you really, really need is a nap.

Where religion clashes with science is that religion makes smart people do stupid things.

You can't get too far into the Gospels without noticing that Jesus made a pretty lousy apologist.

Parenting is the greatest pay it forward system on earth. We don't owe our parents anything. We owe our children everything. The same was true for our parents. The same will be true for our children.

Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he's been kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realises that the worst case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife.

He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy.

Ana was a tornado. A jagged, hundred-sided peg in a community where everyone was supposed to fit into round holes.

…so many ticks steadily around the clock. My heart beats ferociously, as if to say it will not digest this leaving. But you are gone. I could never look into your tormenting eyes again. You mock me with each word you choose…. of the millions of words in the English tongue you could have chosen…you select the one’s that break me down.

Defend myself? I cannot defend the verbal repressions of a boy. A curmudgeonly, cantankerous, ill-tempered, counterfeit boy.

Being in the habit of saying "Thank you," of making sure that people receive attention so they know you value them, of not presuming that people will always be there--this is a good habit, regardless...make sure to give virtual and actual high-fives to those who rock and rock hard.

It's all mine, it's all sacred.

She was my friend. Briefly, she was my lover. She was braver than I ever would have been in the moment of death. And I bet she was a hell of a shooting star.

Rich people show their appreciation through favors. When everyone you know has more money than they know what to do with, money stops being a useful transactional tool. So instead you offer favors. Deals. Quid pro quos. Things that involve personal involvement rather than money. Because when you're that rich, your personal time is your limiting factor.

I am a dumb piece of meatand I rot everydaymy flesh gives a rotting smelland people say it's the smell of lifeand they come to meand watch me rotand get happy and upset and annoyed and disgusted and maybe sometimes feelcompassionbut they don't realize they are rotting too.