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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7952a56 | She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him. | mythology | Donna Leon | |
| fb0a16d | His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman. | Donna Leon | ||
| 1a4e172 | Ella sonrio por primera vez y, de repente, su cara dejo de ser vulgar. | Donna Leon | ||
| 3c8d1a4 | South. `But no name?, 'No, Guido. But I'll keep | Donna Leon | ||
| 682441f | As if sensing his attention, Paola turned her head towards him and allowed her eyes to close and then open slowly, as though she'd been told that the Crucifixion had only just begun and there still remained a number of nails. The | Donna Leon | ||
| bcf9617 | Italian to the core, he did not for an instant doubt that a man could be passionately devoted to the wife he betrayed with other women. | Donna Leon | ||
| 09832bc | He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read. - Guido Brunetti | Donna Leon | ||
| 04c4935 | Patta's expression seemed cordial enough, though from past experience Brunetti knew this was meaningless: vipers liked to bask on rocks in the sunshine, did they not? | Donna Leon | ||
| 2a07951 | We work in a profession that has consequences for the heart, | Donna Leon | ||
| e07e19c | Lampedusa had it right--things had to seem to change so that things could remain the same. | Donna Leon | ||
| 26b6ffe | Pucetti's was the generation that was all in favour of sentiment, sharing other people's pain, voicing compassion for the downtrodden, yet Brunetti often found in them traces of a ruthlessness that chilled his spirit and made him fearful for the future. He wondered if the cheap sentimentality of television and film had sent them into some sort of emotional insulin shock and suffocated their ability to feel empathy with the unappealing victi.. | Donna Leon | ||
| 329ed9d | We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as "the common good". The best of us can rise to feeling concern for our families, but as a nation we are incapable of more." | Donna Leon | ||
| fe7ed81 | We all have a memory and can memorise things. The more important thing is how we act on that which we know. | Peter Tremayne | ||
| 9614f4c | The reason was not hard to discern. The head of the body was also shaven with the tonsure of Columba. What remained of his clothing proclaimed it to have once consisted of the habit of a religieux, though there was no sign of the crucifix, leather belt and satchel that a peregrinus pro Christo would have carried. The leading traveller had drawn near on his mule and gazed up with a terrified expression on his white features. Another of the p.. | Peter Tremayne | ||
| df03387 | The young woman continued to frown, displaying her irritation. 'You would continue on and leave one of our brethren in this manner? Unblessed and unburied?' Her voice was sharp and angry. | Peter Tremayne | ||
| b3d2365 | No, she answered, "one is of tin, and one of straw; one is a girl and another a Lion. None of them is fit to work, so you may tear them into small pieces." | Lynda Barry | ||
| 565f456 | Some lights shine without any flashing. Others flash on and off. | Lynda Barry | ||
| e670abe | once i knew the blinking cat could not really blink, was just paper and ink. | Lynda Barry | ||
| 52d6970 | It is next to impossible in isolation to manufacture the beautiful, radical grace that flows from the heart of God to God's broken and blessed humanity. As | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| d6d3e29 | the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 93aa650 | Every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it. | lutheran | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| 82c705e | Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word. My selfishness is not the end-all... instead, it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn't about God creating humans as flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to.. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| abf4959 | the Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It's about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 86b54bf | What Mary would do is show up and remind us that despite the violence and fear, it's still always worth it to love God and to love people. And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of it. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 98b2e57 | Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Jesus always seems to be pairing God's forgiveness of us with our forgiveness of others. But why? Growing up, I thought it was a way of guilting us into forgiving others, like Jesus was saying, Hey, I died for you and you can't even be nice to your little brother? As though God can get us to do the right thing if God can just make us feel bad about how much we owe God. But that is .. | guilt manipulation religion | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| c9d8484 | So are demons forces that are totally external to us who seek to defy God? Are they just the shadow side of our own souls? Are they social constructions from a premodern era? Bottom line: Who cares? I don't think demons are something human reason can put its finger on. Or that human faith can resolve. I just know that demons, whether they be addictions or actual evil spirits, are not what Jesus wants for us, since basically every time he en.. | faith jesus | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| bb1c5ea | That's the crazy thing about Christianity -- the idea that the finite can contain the infinite. After all, what is the incarnation if not that? So there's an incredible physicality to the spiritual within the Christian story. There's not this weird sort of Greek separation, where there's a higher spiritual world and a corrupted, bad world of flesh. It's all one. Because if God chose to have a body, there's a way in which spiritual things .. | physicality | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| 9df0c68 | My selfishness is not the end-all... instead, it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 635dc6d | The Kingdom of God is a tricky concept, and I was always taught it referred to our heavenly reward for being good, which, now that I actually read the Bible for myself, makes very little sense. Others say that the Kingdom of God is another way of talking about the church, and still others say that it's the dream God has for the wholeness of the world, a dream being made true little by little among us right here, right now. My answer? All of.. | christian-faith christianity faith god jesus kingdom-of-god lutheran | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| de16327 | I cared about Ben, but I was never in love with him. I was in love with what it said about me that I had a boyfriend like Ben, and that's just different. | christianity girlfriend growing-up in-love love romance | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| eeb95eb | And with an openness that felt like spiritual waterboarding (Jesus holding my head under the waters of my own baptism until I cry uncle), I had a long conversation with my enemy. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 7d30590 | No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don't continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that's different from spiritual self-improvement. | christianity god-s-grace pastor-ross-merkel sermon spirituality | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| f094a5e | This, to me, is the point of the confession and absolution in the liturgy. When I first experienced it--the part where everyone in church stands up and says what bad people they are, and the pastor, from the distance of the chancel and the purity of her white robe says, "God forgives you"--I thought it was hogwash. Why should I care if someone says to me that some God I may or may not really believe in has erased the check marks against me .. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 3a507a6 | The beauty of our sky is really just a nice way for the earth to protect us from the terror of what's so vast and unknowable beyond. The boundlessness of the universe is disturbing when you think about it. It's too big and we're too small. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 5100ae2 | mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be temptation to self-loathing or self-aggrandizement, depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence. We are tempted to doubt our innate value precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from, and our relationship to, God. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 5603a4c | 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 .. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 127b734 | We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as a community based on the ability to follow rules. | rules | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| 8eb1f02 | There's not enough wrong with it to leave and there's just enough wrong with it to stay," Matthew later told me. "Fight to change it." | dissatisfaction | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| c988bd3 | Knowing all of this makes me love and hate Jesus at the same time. Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, he contrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times I've substituted being good (or appearing to be good) for truth. | jesus truth | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| 2827d47 | This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time. | reason | Nadia Bolz-Weber | |
| 64e7e22 | I think this is why we at House for All Sinners and Saints sometimes say that we are religious but not spiritual. Spiritual feels individual and escapist. But to be religious (despite all the negative associations with that word) is to be human in the midst of other humans who are as equally messed up and obnoxious and forgiven as ourselves. It allows us, when confronted both with assholes in SUVs or by our own intolerances, to hold up brea.. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 097f17a | Jesus was a real revolutionary and that Christianity had unfortunately given the guy a bad name. | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 33351bd | The disciples' mistake was also my mistake: They forgot that they have a God who created the universe out of "nothing," that can put flesh on dry bones "nothing," that can put life in a dusty womb "nothing." I mean, let's face it, "nothing" is God's favorite material to work with." -- | Nadia Bolz-Weber | ||
| 6158821 | And I get it. I can be cynical myself. Every time I see some smiley TV preacher talk about God's plan for me or hear Sarah Palin say something irretrievably mean and stupid about poor people, or every time I pass an embarrassing billboard featuring Jesus and a fetus, I totally get why reasonable people would keep their distance. | Nadia Bolz-Weber |