Quotes by American Authors - Page 154

Rylan!"Nadia and I turn our heads simultaneously towards the entrance to the living room as Tim Powers appears."Yeah?" I yell across the room.That's when I notice the expression on Power' face. A mixture of awe, amazement, appreciation, and a bit of jealousy."Your girlfriend's here," Tim informs me.He steps aside, and a goddess enters the room.It's been forever since I first had those dreams Ivy sent me with her in her disguise. But I still remember how she looks. Pale skin, long hair, bright-green eyes, and a model's figure. A perfect dream girl, who's now reality.Ivy smiles shyly as she steps into the room. Her skin is porcelain, unflawed and shiny. White-blind hair, straight and flowing, falls down her back and ends a little bit past her waist. She's not wearing her woven grass robe, but instead a dress mist likely altered from a piece of clothing from her clothes sack. It probably reached the floor at one point, with long sleeves, but the sleeves are gone and the skirt's been snipped away, leaving behind a green dress that shows off mile-long legs.But her face...all that pales in comparison to her face. Heart-shaped, with high cheekbones, an elegant nose, a well-shaped chin, and her lips—she's not covering them anymore—two shimmering, bright green pools I would be happy to drown in or go through. People believe the eyes are the window to your soul, and Ivy's soul is beautiful.
Colleen Boyd
Tragedy cleans the windows of the soul by washing away the bias of our lives in the detergent of pain.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The dead are immune from our prison of Time. The distance between the living and dead may be vast, but the space of Time the dead experience when they are reunited with their loved ones is only paper-thin.
Suzy Kassem
Clarity in my cup. Transparency of my soul. Lucidity of myself. Elixir of the ages. Tea makes us all sages.
Dharlene Marie Fahl
Have intention, sacred will travel.
S. Kelley Harrell
The ongoing struggle to achieve a profound harmony between the deepest and most conflicting impulses of human beings instates the murkiness of my soul. The battle against the amorphousness of sin and depravity, and seeking unity and clarity, trace their origins to the primeval fire that launched humanity. This ancient warfare for control of the soul allows me to create myself. Because of the primordial inconsistences between ecstasy and reason, I am the repentant artist of my being. I am a beardless, sensuous, and androgynous sculptor, the redeemer and the transformer of my naked self.
Kilroy J. Oldster
I love letting my soul soar on a summer breeze, or getting entranced by the rhythm of the sea. It carries you off on its currents until you’re completely lost and then drops you back on the shores of reality with salt on your cheeks and grains of dreams running through your fingers like sand. It’s almost an occasional necessity – I guess because when you get completely, fantastically, dizzyingly lost you’re temporarily suspended between what has been and what could be. In those first moments when you come back up for air, or when you float back down to the ground, you’re living in the land of possibility, where you understand that reality can stretch just as far as you’re willing to dream.
Cristen Rodgers
In these dark and uncertain times, there can be great value in imagining a bit of star in each human soul. Not just that it gives some hope for humanity at a time when man’s inhumanity to man seems ever on the increase; but also because it points to an inner brightness that can light the way in dark times.
Michael Meade
We must exude a sense of proportional gratitude that humankind’s exquisite texture is composed of a feeling soul and an intelligent will, which people refer to as memory of the heart.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Like everyone, I want my soul to thrum. I run my long nails over the keys like I'm scratching the back of a lover.
Carlos Hernández
ALS is like a lit candle: it melts your nerves and leaves your body a pile of wax.. you cannot support yourself standing.. you cannot sit up straight. By the end, if you are still alive.. your soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk.. like something from a science fiction movie, the man frozen inside his own flesh.
Mitch Albom
Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach.
Criss Jami
On this material plane, each living being is like a street lantern lamp with a dirty lampshade.The inside flame burns evenly and is of the same quality as all the rest—hence all of us are equal in the absolute sense, the essence, in the quality of our energy.However, some of the lamps are “turned down” and having less light in them, burn fainter, (the beings have a less defined individuality, are less in tune with the universal All which is the same as the Will)—hence all of us are unequal in a relative sense, some of us being more aware (human beings), and others being less aware (animal beings), with small wills and small flames.The lampshades of all are stained with the clutter of the material reality or the physical world.As a result, it is difficult for the light of each lamp to shine through to the outside and it is also difficult to see what is on the other side of the lampshade that represents the external world (a great thick muddy ocean of fog), and hence to “feel” a connection with the other lantern lamps (other beings).The lampshade is the physical body immersed in the ocean of the material world, and the limiting host of senses that it comes with.The dirt of the lampshade results from the cluttering bulk of life experience accumulated without a specific goal or purpose.The dirtier the lampshade, the less connection each soul has to the rest of the universe—and this includes its sense of connection to other beings, its sense of dual presence in the material world and the metaphysical world, and the thin connection line to the wick of fuel or the flow of electricity that resides beyond the material plane and is the universal energy.To remain “lit” each lantern lamp must tap into the universal Source of energy.If the link is weak, depression and-or illness sets in.If the link is strong, life persists.This metaphor to me best illustrates the universe.
Vera Nazarian
I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche...
James Hillman
More learning can occur when there are many obstacles then when thear are few or none. A life with difficult relationships, filled with obstacles and losses, presents the most opportunity for the soul's growth. You may have chosen the more difficult life so that you could accelerate your physical progress
Brian L. Weiss
I wanted the monster back and that was plainly wrong.
Stephenie Meyer
Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.
Dave Pelzer
So now the sky was falling. Maybe the end of the world. Maybe Jesus coming again. That suited her.White lights shot across the sky. She lost count. She stood and watched through Sidney's telescope and felt. For the first time in a year she wasn't ice cold all the way to her soul. It was as close as she could be to free in her stronghold of a home.Logic told her that the world probably wasn't coming to an end. That would be too easy. She hadn't had an easy day in her life.She pulled the telescope away from her eye and watched white slices of heavenly light. Content with the goosebumps of fear, her spirits rose. Assuming the world wasn't ending, she'd come to a good place out here. Her children were safe. She was safe-- bitterly lonely but safe.
Mary Connealy
Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.
Richard C. Carrier
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 are revealed in the physical things that are all around us — bread, wine, people, tears, laughter.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Initially, the God of the Old Testament might seem overwhelming and domineering to you, or tyrannical, or perhaps even evil, which is good. It is the first telling that God is indeed God, by sheer definition, and not some ear-tickling fairy by which one in his depravity is guaranteed to find another form of stale romanticism or love at first sight. For such a first impression as the latter would be problematic to the essence of Christianity. Therefore the Christians are right in saying that the nature of imperfect men cannot ultimately co-exist with the nature of a perfect God; and that the hope of each man is now desperately found in God's sending of Christ.
Criss Jami
Life has been dark but full of light; sad, but full of joy; disappointing, but full of hope; needy but full of plenty, sick but full of health.
Reverend Ada Slaton Bonds
I had a love affair with life, and as is the custom, I will lose, but will regain a greater love with my heavenly Father.
Reverend Ada Slaton Bonds
Jesus, unlike the founder of any other major faith, holds out hope for ordinary human life. Our future is not an ethereal, impersonal form of consciousness. We will not float through the air, but rather will eat, embrace, sing, laugh, and dance in the kingdom of God, in degrees of power, glory, and joy that we can't at the present imagine.
Timothy J. Keller
To be the salt, you also need to be the shaker. To shake the world. Shake the truth. Shake the people. Shake the word. Have it sprinkle, melt and preserve humanity.
Anthony Liccione
Our faith is built in the dark, in the valleys, and during the back-breaking battles in life.
Dana Arcuri
Shane lingered over a sickly sweet bit of doggerel comparing accepting Christ into one’s life with turning a pumpkin into a Jack-o-Lantern. “It sounds like God is seriously going to mutilate you.”Roselyn took the pamphlet from Shane, her eyes flickering over the text. “I always pictured it a bit more like a lobotomy than an evisceration.
Thomm Quackenbush
No one whose steps are truly ordered by God will ever attempt to walk over another human being.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
We are not as some people like to assume nowadays 'just being real' by embracing passively the sinful, fallen versions of ourselves. Quite the opposite really: our true selves were, from the beginning, intended to resemble the example which was then set by Christ Jesus; hence God wants to restore us to how we would have been had original sin never once befell.
Criss Jami
The Catholic Church standing in "solidarity" with members of the LGBT community while condemning their behavior as "sinful" is a little like attempting to stand with two feet in one shoe. "Love the sinner, hate the sin" sounds really high-minded until you realize the only sin committed was being born different.
Quentin R. Bufogle
In fact she’s a Baptist, which is almost like being Christian, only louder.
Orson Scott Card
Without a beginning I am pouring the whole of my existence into the building of endings, while the cross and the resurrection declare that God is incessantly building beginnings from the collapse of endings.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans [i.e., Christians] say they believe and what, in fact, they do believe, as demonstrated by their actions. A religion of brotherhood and mildness which daily murders those who disagree with its doctrines can only be thought hypocrite, or worse.
Gore Vidal
If I must know something in order to believe in it, what I am able to believe in will be severely limited. If I choose to believe in something in order to know it, then what I believe in can be boundless.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The worst thing that I can do is humanize God. The second worst thing that I can do is deify myself. And the best thing that I can do is to avoid both.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We are quick to surrender that which we deem as long dead, when God is quick to restore that which He deems as never really having lived.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The drum to which we march reveals the conductor to whom we’re listening.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The length of the fall is dictated by how far we had climbed. The outcome of the fall is dictated by whether we’re holding on to that which we’re climbing, or we’re letting God hold onto us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Despite my best effort to make myself as large as absolutely possible, life will always be larger than me. That simple fact makes God not only a likelihood, but a necessity.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To only see ‘death’ in death is to somehow assume that death itself is a barrier so abrupt that God Himself is halted by it. To see ‘life’ in death is to understand that death is a sprawling horizon to a new beginning that God created long before death ever thought to show up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I often think myself to be so ingenious that I don’t even realize that my own plans may actually be my own undoing. Therefore, I might be wise to realize that God’s plans undo what I’ve done that’s undoing me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Growing up I sometimes imagined that for Christ's return perhaps He would appear as 'Black Jesus' to white people and 'White Jesus' to black people just to screw with the racists.
Criss Jami
Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The most formidable way to lead is to serve. And while the perplexing oxymoron of such a grinding statement absolutely cripples us, it birthed a Savior.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The sure path to tomorrow was plotted in a manger and paved on a cross. And although this sturdy byway is mine for the taking, I have incessantly chosen lesser paths. And maybe it is time to realize that Christmas is a promise that I can walk through the world and never get lost in the woods.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I have yet to learn that I am not designed to carry the burden of men. Rather, I am designed to carry the love of God so that I might soothe the burden of men.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Why would god allow the Holocaust to happen? If god made everything, why did he invent sin to trick us and then hold our sins against us? Why are there so many religions in the world if god created the world and wants us to be Christian? Why does god allow people to fight wars over him? What if you were born in a different culture and never even heard of Jesus Christ—would god send you to hell for not being Christian? And if so, do you believe that's fair? Why are men always the leaders in your church? Aren't women capable of leading too? Isn't such a patriarchal system sexist in this day and age? Why do so many babies die? Why are there so many poor people in the world? Did Jesus visit any other planets in distant unknown universes?
Matthew Quick
Every journey has a beginning. The starting point of prayer is God. Like a father who waits to hear every detail of your life, He waits for you. You don’t need to get dressed up and go to church to reverently pray. The God of the universe invites you to come as you are. You can endure anything when you are at God’s side. He is the transformer. He turns sorrow to joy. He turns bitter to sweet.
Sue Detweiler
I pray for sufficient wisdom to understand that wisdom apart from God is the stuff of opinion tainted by the rot of bias. And if I am somehow apt to confuse such rubbish with wisdom, I will think myself wise but find myself living in a landfill.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Greatness untethered from God results in calamity unrestrained by men.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I’ve heard so many people, particularly people of faith, say they could look past his wrongdoings. When they’re pressed further, the reply is always some variation of “He doesn’t mean what he says,” “It’s just to get a rise out of people,” or “It’s all for show.” When you turn a blind eye and a deaf ear and say nothing, you are in fact saying everything. You are telling others you approve of immorality and injustice. You are telling them you support the marginalization and vilification of those who are different from you. You are telling them that fear reigns supreme and that you will tolerate nefarious behavior. As President John F. Kennedy said in a speech: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crises, maintain their neutrality.”- Amy Erickson
Erin Passons
In one way or another, every mission that I have ever set out on to rescue myself is yet another mission that I end up needing to be rescued from. Hence, there is God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Montrose leaned forward. “Jacob, what's wrong with you? Why would you want to do this? What kind of husband . . . what kind of man are you?”“I don't know.” Jacob's voice was a whisper. “But before I pledged myself to Annie, I pledged myself to God.”“I hope you know what you're doing.” Montrose glanced back towards the kitchen. In their silence, they heard Annie's low sobs. “I hope it's worth it.
Willowy Whisper
Our prayers are something akin to delivering a list, verses surrendering a life. The former will always leave me creating the next list, while the latter will leave me creating a new life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe what I need to be rescued from is the feeling that I don’t need to be rescued, for without a doubt this is the most difficult rescue of all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There’s not much that I can find in places where there is nothing to find. However, to avoid facing God I find myself spending a lot of time in those very places.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A father teaches his children that the battle is not determined by the enemy that stands around them, but by the God Who stands within them. And that lesson can only be driven home as they watch their father stand around them, while God stands within their father.
Craig D. Lounsbrough