Quotes by Bloggers - Page 3

There is nothing nominal or lukewarm or indifferent about standing in this hurricane of questions every day and staring each one down until you've mustered all the bravery and fortitude and trust it takes to whisper just one of them out loud
Rachel Held Evans
Mine is a stubborn and recalcitrant faith. It's all elbows and motion and kicked-up dust, like cartoon characters locked in a cloudy brawl. I'm still early in my journey, but I suspect it will go on like this for a while, perhaps until my last breath.
Rachel Held Evans
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.
Rachel Held Evans
You say ‘cure.’ I hear ‘you’re not human enough.
John Scalzi
Shitty values involve tangible external goals outside of our control. Better values are process-oriented.
Mark Manson
Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say.
Fredrik Backman
Talent is one thing, personality and attitude is everything!
Lily Amis
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.
Belle de Jour
Romance means believing you are worthy of a happy ending.
Sarah Wendell
One unforeseen advantage of having a  child was that it gave me the excuse to talk to myself to my heart's content and pretend it was for my daughters benefit.
Catherine Sanderson
When tadpole was born, I spent a sleepless night on the maternity ward gazing intently into her inky, newborn eyes, grappling to come to terms with the indisputable fact that this was an actual person looking back at me, not just a version of Mr Frog, or me, or both, in miniature. From the outset she seemed to know what she wanted, and I realised I could have no inkling of the paths she would choose to follow. But if I watch her life unfold carefully enough, perhaps I will see clear signposts pointing to who or what she will become.Because when I look backwards, ransacking my own past for clues with the clarity that only hindsight can bring, several defining moments do stand out. Moments charged with significance; snapshots of myself which, if I were to join the dots together, lead me unswervingly to where I stand today.
Catherine Sanderson
She goes silent. Ashamed of herself as mothers are when they realize they have passed that point in life when they want more from their daughters than their daughters want from them.
Fredrik Backman
I hope Marcus (giggle) is there. Maybe he can defeat the evil Cullens with his mighty battle cry, "I can see relationships!!!
Dan Bergstein
I’ll be as loving as you will be, as stubborn as I know you are, as passionate as I’m thankful you are and as supportive and understanding as I’ve known you to be. You are my best friend and I love you
Danielle-Claude Ngontang Mba
Meeting him was a miracle. He was a precious gift sent from God from heaven above!
Lily Amis
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.
Fredrik Backman
Ladies let me give you some advice: Men will treat you the way you let them. There is no such thing as “deserving” respect; you get what you demand from people,
Tucker Max
Friendship is like a flower. It needs daily love and care to blossom. If you forget to give it water, the flower dies. It’s as simple as that! Teddy
Lily Amis
For anyone who wonders what it's like to have a tragedy shatter your existence, this is what I would tell them: it's like going through the motions of everyday life in a zombified state. It's having outbursts of anger for what seems like no apparent reason, for even the smallest of offenses. It's forgetting how to be your once cheerful, perky self, and having to relearn basic social skills when mingling with new people (especially if those people are ignorant, or just plain terrible at showing sympathy). It takes a while to re-learn all those basic skills. Maybe...it's possible. Maybe you have to want your life back first, before it can start repairing itself But then you also have to accept that the mending process may take the rest of your life. I don't think there's a set time limit for it.
Sarahbeth Caplin
One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.
John Michael Greer
People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.
Fredrik Backman
Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest.
Leo Babauta
What kind of world have we built when it is more acceptable to ask for sex than a cuddle session? … Have we so stripped our sexuality of inherent value that it becomes the sacrificial lamb on the altar of connection, because everything else is too precious to risk? I'm the first one to say that my body is an amusement park, and I like to have fun with it – and let other people ride it – but there is still a divinity in it. It is no less precious than our fears, our smiles, our hopes, our tears. And this goes not just for women, but for all people. I've known men and dominants who felt they could be vulnerable only during sex, and so they would ask for that instead of talking about what was bothering them, or even simply as a distraction from their own thoughts and troubles.
Kacie Cunningham
Leon had attached himself to me in Chicago like a fat, brat-and-beer-filled tick; I was amazed that someone whose blood was clearly half pork grease had made it to age seventy-five.
John Scalzi
And then Mum spoons the coffee a little as if she’s having fantasies of flinging it in Britt-Marie’s face. But in a controlled way.
Fredrik Backman
Just everything else, Mum. I just have everything else from you.
Fredrik Backman
Never judge people based on their nationality, religion, race, gender, skin colour or look. Humans are all the same. They’re God’s loving children." Angel of Hope
Lily Amis
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?
Tim Challies
In the space between waves, we have the choice. To jump, to dive, to ride, to play. To face what's coming without running away.
Patty Chang Anker
Going to the seaside in winter is like seeing your partner first thing in the morning. Ugly, depressing and troubled by wind.
Andy Leeks
As an adult, getting paid thousands of dollars a week to say, “Aye, Sir. Course laid in” is a seriously sweet gig, but when I was a teenager, it sucked.
Wil Wheaton
I am not where I am because of luck. I am where I am because I took risks others weren’t willing to take. The world rewards the risk takers. It always has. It always will.
Dan Pearce
Don't be mad at me for my success. Be mad at yourself for not doing what it takes to get what I have. Then do something amazing with that emotion.
Dan Pearce
Every person is attractive to somebody. You are. I am. Jim Bob over there is, too. Every person is probably ugly to somebody, too. You are. I am. Jim Bob over there is, too. Don’t take it personally.And, we all need to do ourselves a favor. We need to believe people when they tell us we’re beautiful, handsome, sexy, attractive, hot, or hunkalicious, especially when that someone is somebody that we think is beautiful, handsome, sexy, attractive, hot, or babealicious.Because you know what? They probably really think so. They probably aren’t lying. They probably don’t give a damn that you don’t look like Pamela Anderson.
Dan Pearce
The most difficult part of dating as a single parent is deciding how much risk your own child’s heart is worth.
Dan Pearce
People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.
Fredrik Backman
People can turn into idiots if they're alone for long enough. (Mum)
Fredrik Backman
When you cry out against a God who punishes people in a place like hell, you cry out against the God who has revealed Himself in the pages of Scripture. You cry out against His goodness, holiness, and justice; and all the while you minimize your own sinfulness or the sinfulness of others.
Tim Challies
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.
John Scalzi
Most people who have had a rough background will admit there’s something unsettling about finding happiness after difficulty – that even after we unwrap this gift, we don’t know how to stop searching, rummaging, pilfering for something else. We walk haltingly through life, ready for the other shoe to drop. The question is not if, but when.
Sasha Martin
It is, in truth, our responsibility to understand our needs and to adjust our perceptions,thoughts, decisions, behaviors, and environments to reflect these needs. We can’t force others to change, but we can change ourselves.
Aletheia Luna
But he couldn’t risk taking the helmet off. It was the only thing saving him from the firing squad. He was no longer able to keep his thoughts silent. No longer able to squash his misgivings about what he had done.
T.C. Avey
But they promised us everyone would return someday…when it was safe.” Her voice cracked at the end.“You’re being stupid again. Trusting in what they say.” Disdain dripped from his words like pus from an infected wound.
T.C. Avey
..Liberals see racism where it doesn't exist, fabricate it when they can't find it and ignore it within their own ranks.
Michelle Malkin
Now, as a non-Amish person in the twentieth century who is not a part of the aging and thus noncoveted seventy-five-plus marketing demographic that views things like cell phones and iPads with that quaint, old-people mixture of astonishment, fascination, confusion, and abject fear, I spend as much time pawing my cell phone as members of the postpubescent marketing demographic spend pawing each other and themselves.
BikeSnobNYC
Technology presents us with a unique spiritual challenge. Because it is meant to serve us in fulfilling our created purpose, because it makes our lives easier, longer, and more comfortable, we are prone to assign to it something of a godlike status. We easily rely on technology to give our lives meaning, and we trust technology to provide an ultimate answer to the frustration of life in a fallen world. Because of this, technology is uniquely susceptible to becoming an idol, raising itself to the place of God in our lives.
Tim Challies
There’s no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural.
John Michael Greer
Colonization is the key to our race’s survival. It’s as simple as that. We must colonize or be closed off and contained by other races.
John Scalzi
A more common explanation for the feeling of being Old in Soul is tied up in Buddhist and Hindu ideas of reincarnation, or metempsychosis. Interestingly, this is most likely where the origin of the phrase “Old Soul” came from in the first place.
Aletheia Luna
Time to get a go on this drop-dead-gorgeous morning.
Coco J. Ginger
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.
Rachel Held Evans
That NASA was involved suggests that L.A. was considered so alien both to police officers and to scientists that it resembled the landscape of another world. There is Mars, there is the moon, and there is Los Angeles.
Geoff Manaugh
Mason was a first-rate spatial voyeur, an autodidact of architectural exteriors.
Geoff Manaugh
You do what you have to do to give people closure; it makes them feel better and it doesn’t cost you much to do it. I’d rather apologize for something I didn’t really care about, and leave someone on Earth wishing me well, than to be stubborn and have that someone hoping that some alien would slurp out my brains. Call it karmic insurance.
John Scalzi
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.
Barista Uno
...because you are not trying simply to complete a set of books or toys or Weetabix cards, you are trying to complete yourself, to get back to the whole person you were before, as a child, before the obstructions and compromises of adulthood got in the way. And yet, all you are really doing is accumulating a pile of crap, souvenirs of the futility of the quest.
Neil Perryman
When you're a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.
John Scalzi
Time is limited and some opportunities never repeat themselves.
Belle de Jour
A Romantic builds everyday fulfillment through tenacious observation of daily life and an abundance of reliance on intuition. The result: An extraordinary life lived in ordinary days.
Shannon Ables
In the past few years, more and more passionate debates about the nature of SFF and YA have bubbled to the surface. Conversations about race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, romance, bias, originality, feminism and cultural appropriation are getting louder and louder and, consequently, harder to ignore. Similarly, this current tension about negative reviews is just another fissure in the same bedrock: the consequence of built-up pressure beneath. Literary authors feud with each other, and famously; yet genre authors do not, because we fear being cast as turncoats. For decades, literary writers have also worked publicly as literary reviewers; yet SFF and YA authors fear to do the same, lest it be seen as backstabbing when they dislike a book. (Small wonder, then, that so few SFF and YA titles are reviewed by mainstream journals.) Just as a culture of sexual repression leads to feelings of guilt and outbursts of sexual moralising by those most afflicted, so have we, by denying and decrying all criticism that doesn’t suit our purposes, turned those selfsame critical impulses towards censorship.Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA
Foz Meadows