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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 906b5ca | You gotta be prepared for something, pal. No matter how much you think you're doing the right thing, life can still take a wrong turn on you. | Mike Lupica | ||
| 0320150 | The first movie star I met was Norma Shearer. I was eight years old at the time and going to school with Irving Thalberg Jr. His father, the longtime production chief at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, devoted a large part of his creative life to making Norma a star, and he succeeded splendidly. Unfortunately, Thalberg had died suddenly in 1936, and his wife's career had begun to slowly deflate. Just like kids everywhere else, Hollywood kids had playd.. | Robert Wagner | ||
| ae034c2 | Jeanne's sisters thought nothing of themselves.... Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers.... Helen was the baker of the family. What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch. | death grief | Allegra Goodman | |
| cef7d8f | I have a dark sense of humor,' Fanny explained. 'What's that supposed to mean?' asked Honor. 'It means I'm funny once you get to know me,' Fanny said. | Allegra Goodman | ||
| 2ee8549 | I prefer feeling insignificant," said Jess. "I don't believe that." "I didn't say worthless, I said insignificant, as in the grand scheme of things." "But why?" "Because humans have such a complex. We're so self-involved. You have to get out to a place like this to remember how small humanity really is." And Jess was right. Numbers didn't matter here. Money didn't count, and all the words and glances, the quick exchanges that built or tore.. | forest fresh-air insignificant jess-bach nature perspective | Allegra Goodman | |
| 9c2decf | He draws asparagus and cabbages, but he's obsessed with artichokes. He draws them more than any other vegetable. Why artichokes?" George drained his glass. "The artichoke is a sexy beast. Thorns to cut you, leaves to peel, lighter and lighter as you strip away the outer layers, until you reach the soft heart's core." | jess-and-george tom-mcclintock | Allegra Goodman | |
| 69c2863 | She had applied to college without her parents' knowledge, and when she got her choral scholarship she broke from childhood, choosing music as her religion. Emily and Jess pressed him, but they didn't understand. Their mother's life began when she came up to Cambridge on her own. "It's like a fairyland here," she used to say, when they walked through the ancient cloisters. She was a quiet rebel, buying a Liberty-dress pattern and sewing her.. | gillian-bach mother rebel | Allegra Goodman | |
| e12e019 | The roses bloomed, thousands of them in a floral amphitheater, blossoms shading from gold and coral at the top of the garden to scarlet and deep pink on tiers below. At the bottom, in the center of the rosy congregation, the palest apricots and ivories perfumed the air. | perfumes roses | Allegra Goodman | |
| 8cfdc40 | I read books, not minds, Guido. | Donna Leon | ||
| 410c0d7 | Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue. | morality virtue | Donna Leon | |
| d7abd59 | For reasons he had never understood, she read a different newspaper each morning, spanning the political spectrum from right to left, and languages from French to English. Years ago, when he had first met her and understood her even less, he had asked about this. Her response, he came to realize only years later, made perfect sense: 'I want to see how many different ways the same lies can be told.' Nothing he had read in the ensuing years h.. | Donna Leon | ||
| de43318 | Once, walking with him, Paola had stopped and asked him what he was thinking about, and the fact that she was the only person in the world he would not be embarrassed to tell just what it was he had been thinking about at that moment convinced him, though a thousand things had already done so, that this was the woman he wanted to marry, had to marry, would marry. | Donna Leon | ||
| 77e62dd | Only the good deserve to hope. | Donna Leon | ||
| b16902d | Most people -- however much they might deny it -- had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it. | intention trouble | Donna Leon | |
| 9172c18 | Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her. | expression mask | Donna Leon | |
| a2bbe29 | You really love to gossip, don't you?" he asked, wishing she had brought him a glass of wine. "Yes, I suppose I do," she answered, sounding surprised at the realization. "You think that's why I love reading novels so much?" | reading | Donna Leon | |
| bddb22c | Women don't use knives,' Griffoni answered, reciting it as though she were Euclid listing another axiom. Although he agreed with her, Brunetti was curious about the basis for her belief. 'You offering proof of that?' 'Kitchens,' she said laconically. 'Kitchens?' 'The knives are kept in the kitchen, and their husbands pass through there every day, countless times, yet very few of them get stabbed. That's because women don't use knives, and t.. | Donna Leon | ||
| 59fc6b0 | We never know them well. Do we?" "Who?" "Real people." "What do you mean, real people?" "As opposed to people in books," Paola explained. "They're the only ones we ever know well. Or know truly." | Donna Leon | ||
| fb6d0f7 | We are a people who question all things and only through our questions can we hope to arrive at the Great Truth and we must stand by the Truth even if we stand against the world. | Peter Tremayne | ||
| 35de6f6 | Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves or looked like we were playing by ourselves. I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played, seems to play back. If playing isn't.. | Lynda Barry | ||
| 01acab7 | Above me soft footsteps, the sound through the ceiling of a teenager haunted by a door to the night. My cousin Maybonne lights up a Salem, blows ghosts to the darkness, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. | Lynda Barry | ||
| 4d5360d | Like say if the mom and dad of god said he could never get dirty. There would be no world! | Lynda Barry | ||
| 4c1704e | The thing i call 'my mind' seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn't really know its tenants. | Lynda Barry | ||
| 8987e22 | The eunuch sought God despite the fact that he had heard that there was no love for him there. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| c532647 | So often in the church, being a pastor or a "spiritual leader" means being the example of "godly living." A pastor is supposed to be the person who is really good at this Christianity stuff -- the person others can look to as an example of righteousness. But as much as being the person who is the best Christian, who "follows Jesus" the most closely can feel a little seductive, it's simply never been who I am or who my parishioners need me .. | leadership pastors | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| 64b013b | I know that people who don't believe in God might scoff at the idea that the creator of the universe has the time or inclination to try incessantly (and with not much long-term success) to change my heart. I get it. I just have no other explanation. | change-of-heart god | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| 265a9e1 | Repentance in Greek means something much closer to "thinking differently afterward" than it does "changing your cheating ways." Of course repentance can look like a prostitute becoming a librarian, but it can also look like a prostitute simply saying, "OK, I'm a sex worker and I don't know how to change that, but I can come here and receive bread and wine and I can hold onto the love of God without being deemed worthy of it by anyone but Go.. | repentance | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| dc886f7 | Australia seems like a really faraway Canada, just with funnier animals. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 475b333 | From my father I heard only these words: "But you were born for such a day as this." He closed the book and my mother joined him in embracing me. They prayed over me and they gave me a blessing. And some blessings, like the one my conservative Christian parents gave to their soon-to-be-Lutheran pastor daughter who had put them through hell, are the kind of blessings that stay with you for the rest of your life. The kind you can't speak of w.. | seminary support | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| f0514b4 | But I cannot pretend, as much as sometimes I would like to, that I have not throughout my life experienced the redeeming, destabilizing love of a surprising God. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 6a62107 | Being part of Christ's bizarro kingdom looks more like being thirsty and having someone you don't even like give you water than it looks like polishing your crown. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 4139fda | Truth. It can make me hate the person speaking it. Until the point at which I want to kiss them for setting me free. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 384c242 | I say no when I should say yes. I say yes when I should say no. I stumble into holy moments not realizing where I am until they are over. I love poorly, then accidently say the right thing at the right moment without even realizing it, then forget what matters, then show tenderness when it's needed, and then turn around and think of myself way too often. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 4b491bc | Again and again Jesus had said they should preach forgiveness of sins in his name. Maybe Judas was destined to betray Jesus. Maybe it couldn't have gone down in any other way than it did. But maybe Judas chose death too soon. Maybe he didn't avail himself of the means of God's grace, and maybe his community never sought him out and offered it. Maybe extending the Word of God's forgiveness to Judas was simply too painful for the disciples .. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 18326cb | The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 9cbce18 | I have come to realize that all the saints I've known have been accidental ones -- people who inadvertently stumbled into redemption like they were looking for something else at the time, people who have just a wee bit of a drinking problem and manage to get sober and help others to do the same, people who are as kind as they are hostile. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| c678fbb | Until I face the difficulty of that question and come up, as Philip did, with no good answer... until then, I can only look at the seemingly limited space under the tent and think either it's my job to change people so they fit or it's my job to extend the roof so that they fit. Either way, it's misguided because it's not my tent. It's God's tent. The wideness of the tent of the Lord is my concern only insofar as it points to the gracious n.. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 31e99d3 | It's about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 56faeb2 | And to say "Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy" is to lay our hope in the redeeming work of the God of Easter as though our lives depended on it. Because they do. It means that we are an Easter people, a people who know that resurrection, especially in and among the least likely people and places, is the way that God redeems even the biggest messes we make" | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 6ee956a | This community will disappoint them. It's a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I'll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they'll stick around after it happens. If they choose to leave when we don't meet their expectations, they won't get to see how the grace of God can come in and fill the holes left by our community's failure, and that's .. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 982ee5d | If becoming a person of faith were more like, say, receiving a personality transplant, life would be easier. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| e017e66 | Some would say that instead of the cross being about Jesus standing in for us to take the really bad spanking from God for our own naughtiness (the fancy theological term for this is substitutionary atonement), what happens at the cross is a "blessed exchange." God gathers up all our sin, all our broken-ass junk, into God's own self and transforms all that death into life. Jesus takes our crap and exchanges it for his blessedness." | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 8e57215 | Unitarians just don't talk much about our need for God's grave. They have a higher opinion of human beings than I have ever felt comfortable claiming, as someone who both reads the paper and knows the condition of my own heart. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 2b43cf5 | But then at two a.m. I was startled awake with what can only be described as a bitch slap from the Holy Spirit. | Nadia Bolz-Weber |