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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 931b8f5 | I wanted to recover the kind of faith that has nothing to do with being sure what I believe and everything to do with trusting God to catch me though I am not sure of anything. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 6f62b76 | If Jesus were in charge of an average congregation I figure there would be about four people left there on Sunday mornings, and chances are those four would be fooling themselves. Jesus would greet newcomers by saying, "Are you absolutely sure you want to follow this way of life? It will take everything you have. It has to come before everything else that matters to you. Plenty of people have launched out on it without counting the cost, an.. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 87bb0e9 | When visitors come to a worship service in my own religious tradition, a great deal depends on how warmly they are welcomed and whether they feel included or excluded by what they hear during the short time they are with us. We may have exactly one shot at communicating who we are to people who know nothing about us - or who think they already know a lot about us - but who, in either case, will remember us at the embodiment of our entire tr.. | religion inspirational first-impressions welcome tradition | barbara brown taylor | |
| b10be6e | For reasons no one may ever understand, God decided it would be helpful for people to be different instead of the same, if only because it would slow them down a little bit. God decided it would be good for them to have to stop on a regular basis and say, 'Could you say that a different way, please? I don't understand what you mean' or 'Can you show me with your hands?' God decided it would be good for them to stop taking their communicatio.. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| c321bd1 | WHEN YOU LIVE IN GOD, your day begins when you open your eyes, though you have done nothing yourself to open them, and you take your first breath, though there is no reason why this life-giving breeze should be given to you and not to some other. In the dark or in the light, with a stone slab under your back or a feather topper, your day begins when you let God hold you because you do not have the slightest idea how to hold yourself--when y.. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 9fdcf88 | religion is more than a source of conflict or a calculated way to stay out of hell. Religions are treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 049e423 | Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 7053621 | People ask me: why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do? The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. --M. F. K. Fisher | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 1f6ea93 | Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails. Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act. They are free to act, trusting that the practice itself will teach them what they need to know. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| c9e28f6 | As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, "People of the Book risk putting the book above people." | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 1c51b3b | Once, at the end of a field trip to the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, the imam ended his meeting with students by saying, 'Our deepest desire is not that you become Muslim, but that you become the best Christian, the best Jew, the best person you can be. In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Thank you for coming.' Then he was gone, leaving me with a fresh case of holy envy. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| 849d305 | This larder of memories, of sex, of life, of family that we had built up, could always be called upon in the leaner times of our relationship... Everything we had built together over twenty years was there to be tapped into, summoned as evidence that we were made to last... I hadn't realized how much I counted on that trick working until the time came when it didn't. | Allison Pearson | ||
| 2b70d3d | The best musicians answer something in you when you don't even know the question. | Allison Pearson | ||
| 25fcf0a | She laughed now, and the sound of it--clear as a bell, dirty as a rugby match--turned heads all along their row. | Allison Pearson | ||
| c363966 | When he laughed, Roy's mouth revealed a Stonehenge of ancient teeth. | Allison Pearson | ||
| d12ee5e | Emily hit the Terrible Twos and I bought a book called Toddler Taming. It was a revelation. The advice on how to deal with small angry immature people who have no idea of limits and were constantly testing their mother applied perfectly to my boss. Instead of treating him as a superior, I began handling him as though he were a tricky small boy. Whenever he was about to do something naughty, I would do my best to distract him; if I wanted hi.. | Allison Pearson | ||
| 621e2ef | Then slowly, as his erratic shape approached the next guttering aura he would begin by degrees to become a silhouette, until immediately before the candle he would for a moment appear like an inky scarecrow, a mantis of pitch-black cardboard worked with strings. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 58e00ed | I saw a Puffin In the Bay of Baffin Sittin on Nuffin And it was Laffin. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 9d4a405 | For answer Mr Flay shot his head forward out of his collar and croaked, 'Silence! you kitchen thing. Hold your tongue you greasy fork. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| e2cc82e | Rottcodd was unmarried. An aloofness and even a nervousness was apparent on first acquaintance and the ladies held a peculiar horror for him. His, then, was an ideal existence, living alone day and night in a long loft. Yet | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 8891202 | The castle was round and about them, widespread and as unchartable as a dark day. | mervyn peake | ||
| 45d55c7 | That night, I hated father. He smelt of cabbage. There was cigarette ash all over his trousers. His untidy moustache was yellower and viler than ever with nicotine, and he took no notice of me. He simply sat there in his ugly arm-chair, his eyes half closed, brooding on the Lord knows what. I hated him. I hated his moustache. I even hated the smoke that drifted from his mouth and hung in the stale air above his head. And when my mother came.. | bourgeoisie petulance | Mervyn Peake | |
| e40aa1e | Let them touch him. For every hair that's hurt I'll stop a heart. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| a826ce3 | Don't you think so? Don't you think so?' 'I am far beyond thinking, bone of my bone. Far, far beyond thinking, I hand over the reins to you, Irma. Mount and be gone. The world awaits you. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 70c71ca | Every blade of the grass was of consequence, and the few scattered stones held an authority that made their solid, separate marks upon the brain - each one with its own unduplicated shape: each rising brightly from the ink of its own spilling. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 276d037 | Words can be tiresome as a swarm of insects. They can prick and buzz! Words can be no more than a series of farts; or on the other hand they can be adamantine, obdurate, inviolable, stone upon stone. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 31ec4e7 | Directly Mr Pye stepped ashore he heard her voice. 'The name is Dredger,' it said. Mr Pye lifted his head again, his thorn-shaped nose veering towards her and the rest of his round face following it, as a ship must follow its bowsprit. His little mouth continued to smile gently but it gave nothing away. As he remained silent, Miss Dredger raised her voice as though to establish the fact of her forthright nature from the outset. 'Mr Pye, I i.. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 8852fbb | He could now inhabit the world of words, with, at the back of his melancholy, a solace he had not known before | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 3ee7bc7 | For what is more lovable than failure? | friendship love failure | Mervyn Peake | |
| 54bd588 | she stepped outwards into the dim atmosphere, and falling, was most fabulously lit by the moon and the sun. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 3777538 | She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich -- her eyes smouldered. A yellow scarf hung loosely around her neck. Her shapeless dress was a flaming red. For all the straightness of her back she walked with a slouch. "Come here," said Lord Groan as she was about to pass him and the doctor. "Yes father," she said huskily. "W.. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 50006d7 | Through her, in microcosm, the wide earth sobbed. The starglobe sank in her; the colours faded. The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 4fe5d09 | In great thick dusty books he read And hardly ever went to bed Before it was eleven. - | reading reading-habits | Mervyn Peake | |
| 06698fe | Before it had awoke to die on the instant of its waking, a score of bells and clocks had shouted midday and for a minute after its death, from near and far the clappers in their tents of rusted iron clanged across Gormenghast. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| d205f33 | Would you be so kind as to remove your redundant carcass from the door of this room, my man,' he said, in his high, abstracted voice; 'and keep it in the kitchen, where it is paid to do this and that among the saucepans, I believe ... would you? No one rang for you. Your mistress' voice, though high, is nothing like the ringing of a bell ... nothing at all. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 0f5ff44 | If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing - flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 525c36c | He watched her almost with indifference -for it was all in the past-and even the present was nothing to the pride of his memory. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 747a887 | He ran because his decision had been made. It had been made for him by the convergence of half-forgotten motives, of desires and reasons, of varied yet congruous impulses. And the convergence of all these to a focus point of action. | Mervyn Peake | ||
| f6d0b12 | His voice is unmuffled - it is like a bell, clearly ringing in the night of our confusion; but the clarity is the clarity of imponderable depth... | Mervyn Peake | ||
| 375579f | One should always be defended against reality. | self-care | Maeve Gilmore | |
| f009e93 | Steerpike of the Many Problems," said the Doctor. "What did you say they were? My memory is so very untrustworthy. It's as fickle as a fox. Ask me to name the third lateral bloodvessel from the extremity of my index finger that runs east to west when I lie on my face at sundown, or the percentage of chalk to be found in the knuckles of an average spinster in her fifty-seventh year, ha, ha, ha! - or even ask me, my dear boy, to give details .. | memory | Mervyn Peake | |
| 0e31397 | His staff had shaken hands with her as though a woman was merely another kind of man. Fools! The seeds of Eve were in this radiant creature. The lullabyes of half a million years throbbed in her throat. Had they no sense of wonder, no reverence, no pride? | women | Mervyn Peake | |
| 2c4e141 | The crumbs blow free down the pointless sea To the beat of a cakey heart And the sensitive steel of the knife can feel That love is a race apart In the speed of the lingering light are blown The crumbs to the hake above, And the tropical air vibrates to the drone Of a cake in the throes of love. | nonsense | Mervyn Peake | |
| 7478526 | There is a kind of laughter that sickens the soul. Laughter when it is out of control: when it screams and stamps its feet, and sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter in all its ignorance and its cruelty. Laughter with the seed of Satan in it. It tramples upon shrines; the belly-roarer. It roars, it yells, it is delirious: and yet it is as cold as ice. It has no humour. It is naked noise and naked malice. | laughter malevolence the-mob | Mervyn Peake |