Catherine Marshall > Quotes

“A Christian has no business being satisfied with mediocrity. He's supposed to reach for the stars. Why not? He's not on his own anymore. He has God's help now.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“The only time I ever find my dealings with God less than clear-cut is when I'm not being honest with Him. The fuzziness is always on my side, not His.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Evil is real - and powerful. It has to be fought, not explained away, not fled. And God is against evil all the way. So each of us has to decide where WE stand, how we're going to live OUR lives. We can try to persuade ourselves that evil doesn't exist; live for ourselves and wink at evil. We can say that it isn't so bad after all, maybe even try to call it fun by clothing it in silks and velvets. We can compromise with it, keep quiet about it and say it's none of our business. Or we can work on God's side, listen for His orders on strategy against the evil, no matter how horrible it is, and know that He can transform it.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“My father always told us that if we will let God, He can use even our disappointments, even our annoyances to bring us a blessing. There's a practical way to start the process too: by thanking Him for whatever happens, no matter how disagreeable it seems.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“I still don't understand anything- exept that somehow I know that You are love. And that in my heart has been so great a love for Christy as I did not know could exist on this earth. You, God, must be responsible. You must have put it there. So what do I do with it now? ”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Have you ever watched a baby learning to walk? He totters, arms stretched out to balance himself. He wobbles - and falls, perhaps bumps his nose. Then he puts the palms of his little hands flat on the floor, hikes his rear end up, looks around to see if anybody is watching him. If nobody is, usually he doesn't bother to cry, just precariously balances himself - and tries again. Well, the baby can teach us. What you've undertaken...isn't a state of perfection to be arrived at all of the sudden. It's a WALK, and a walk isn't static but ever-changing. We Friends say that all discouragement is from an evil source and can only end in more evil. Wallowing in self-condemnation or feeling sorry for yourself is worse than falling on your face in the first place. . . So thee is human.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“When you heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people - especially the ripsnorting sinners - so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Clean up a pigsty," she commented one evening, "and if the creatures in it still have pig-minds and pig-desires, soon it will be the same old pigsty again.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“The house, it's already been a-settin' here for a hundred years. It'll be right here tomorrow. It's today I must be livin'.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“The search for God begins at the point of need.”
― Catherine Marshall, Something More : In Search of a Deeper Faith

“Have you ever thought that the only ugly things in this Cove are man's fault, while the beautiful things are God's work? Look at those mountains.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“It's today I must be living.”
― Catherine Marshall

“Living in the middle of beauty like this, we've no call to have puny ideas about God. Why do you suppose His world is so fancy-fine, so full of wonderment if He doesn't want everything to be good and perfect and right and healthy? But we can spoil His good work. When we mess things up, then we shouldn't blame Him and try to make ourselves feel better by contending that it's what He wanted.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It's quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you've come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Some of what I wrote bordered on blasphemy....If there was a God, He would have to be truth. And in that case, candor--however impertinent--would be more pleasing to Him than posturing.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“I have observed that when any of us embarks on the pursuit of happiness for ourselves, it eludes us. Often I've asked myself why. It must be because happiness comes to us only as a dividend. When we become absorbed in something demanding and worthwhile above and beyond ourselves, happiness seems to be there as a by-product of the self-giving. That should not be a startling truth, yet I'm surprised by how few people understand and accept it. Have we made a god of happiness?..."You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide." John 15:16 RSV....Somehow that passage was like light penetrating their darkness: much of their unhappiness, they realized, was caused by self-centeredness.”
― Catherine Marshall, Something More : In Search of a Deeper Faith

“What do you do when strength is called for and you have no strength? You evoke a power beyond your own and use stamina you did not know you had. You open your eyes in the morning grateful that you can see the sunlight of yet another day. You draw yourself to the edge of the bed and then put one foot in front of the other and keep going. You weep with those who gently close the eyes of the dead, and somehow, from the salt of your tears, comes endurance for them and for you. You pour out that resurgence to minister to the living.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“dont wish upon a star reach for one”
― Catherine Marshall, Stage Fright

“Proofs of the week's paper were spread out on what I grandly called my desk. This was a rickety wooden table against the side wall outside the Editor's office.”
― Catherine Marshall, Julie

“Truth could never be wholly contained in words.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“I'd long since learned that no difference in viewpoint should ever be allowed to cause the least break in love. Indeed, it cannot, if it's real love.
...But relationships can be kept intact without compromising one's own beliefs. And if we do not keep them intact, but give up and allow the chasm, we're breaking the second greatest commandment.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“I understood that the reason we have to accept other people is simply because God receives us just the way we are. Yes, all of us to the last person...

I had never thought it should be that way. Had I been doing it, I would have arranged gradations of acceptability according to how bad or how good we were--or how hard we have tried. But... the Power who broods over our aching world has quite a different idea: He persists in receiving us and loving us all even when we reject Him and refuse to have anything to do with Him, even when we strut our little intellects and insist that He does not exist.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Christy could scarcely take her eyes off Fairlight Spencer. She was beautiful, in a plain, simple way. She had on a worn calico dress, and her feet were bare, despite the cold.”
― Catherine Marshall, The Bridge to Cutter Gap

“Don’t need no more of this world’s goods. Some folks gits plumb mesmerized when paper money is shook afore their eyes.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy: A Historical Novel of Faith, Love, and Courage in the Smoky Mountains

“Did people always have to wait for pestilence or war or tragedy to be shocked into forgetting about themselves?”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy: A Historical Novel of Faith, Love, and Courage in the Smoky Mountains

“God insists that we ask, not because He needs to know our situation, but because we need the spiritual discipline of asking.”
― Catherine Marshall, Adventures in Prayer

“Dreams carried around in one’s heart for years, if they are dreams that have God’s approval, have a way of suddenly materializing.”
― Catherine Marshall

“We found time for less serious things that summer, such as long hours spent playing games like Monopoly, Parcheesi, and Yacht. Peter came honestly by his honorary title of GGP—abbreviation for Great Game Player, bestowed on him by my young brother and sister. My family thought it would look impressive on his church bulletin—thus, “Peter Marshall, DD, GGP.” The day of our wedding saw a cold rain falling, “an ideal day for staying home and playing games,” Peter said. It was indeed. During the morning, I put the finishing touches to my veil and wrestled with a new influx of wedding gifts swathed in tons of tissue paper and excelsior. I gathered the impression that Peter was rollicking through successive games of Yacht, Parcheesi, and Rummy with anyone who had sufficient leisure to indulge him. That was all right, but I thought he was carrying it a bit too far when, thirty minutes before the ceremony, he was so busy pushing his initial advantage in a game of Chinese Checkers with my little sister Em that he still had not dressed.”
― Catherine Marshall, A Man Called Peter

“I could also see just by looking around me how we tend to over-romanticize history. Life in those other centuries had not been all knights-and-ladies stuff. There was nothing romantic about cottages where eight or ten people slept in one room with no privacy; where there were no bathrooms, not even outside privies—even if the cottage did happen to have picturesque thatch on the roof. There was nothing glamorous in any century about no running water in which to bathe or about fleas on human beings; or about the blackgum twigs with which some of the women right now, in 1912, dipped snuff and then rubbed their teeth and gums. So many of the people had terrible-looking teeth or no teeth at all. And the eye trouble that was so prevalent. I had learned that it was trachoma and that it was a dangerous infection which, if unchecked, resulted in blindness.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy: A Historical Novel of Faith, Love, and Courage in the Smoky Mountains

“I'm all for Spencer. He's sincere, idealistic, and a good preacher. I just don't believe that social action is the main business of the Church."
"Then what is?"
"Salvation.”
― Catherine Marshall, Julie