Elizabeth Passarella > Quotes

“What I’d like to say to my Christian brothers and sisters is: my political party, and yours, is not a big deal. It should not be the basis for your identity. It should be a footnote to the person that you are.”
― Elizabeth Passarella, Good Apple: Tales of a Southern Evangelical in New York

“If there is something you take away from these pages, let it be that God is passionately, personally concerned with every small hurt or inconvenience in your life, and you should talk to him about whatever you want, whether it is a real estate deal or a broken washing machine. What happens, though—what certainly happened to me—is that in thinking about how God cares about the humdrum business of your day, you start to fall more in love with him and less in love with the thing you started praying about in the first place. That’s the best possible scenario, if for no other reason than you are a little less stressed out.”
― Elizabeth Passarella, It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward

“The whole crux of the Christian faith is that we cannot save ourselves... I know that I can't fix the brokenness inside me or overcome my own sin. For people who don't share my faith, this sounds totally depressing, I know. And entire self-help sections of bookstores tell you otherwise, I know this too. For some reason it is easier to believe that we can muscle our way to better, more fulfilled selves, rather than accept that we are hopelessly flawed and all of those efforts are going to be temporary. It doesn't mean we are idiots. Or weaklings. We know the phone number. We stay on the block when we are lost. We use the tools God gave us: brains and senses of humor. But ultimately, we cannot always find our way back when we are lost. He has to come get us.”
― Elizabeth Passarella, It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward

“In the Bible, repetition implies importance. Jesus spends a lot of time telling us to love our neighbors. Care for the poor and marginalized. Help the needy. Have dinner with the people in your community that you despise the most. Welcome the stranger. See every man, woman, and child as image bearers of God, valued and beloved. For me, one party tends to favor policies that do that more than the other. It’s as simple as that. My Republican friends will argue with me”
― Elizabeth Passarella, Good Apple: Tales of a Southern Evangelical in New York

“be filled with believers from everywhere: New York, Mississippi, China, Kenya, Saudi Arabia. I don’t know exactly what it will look like, but I can guess that it will look more like my current neighborhood, with its diversity of faces, than the neighborhood where I grew up. Same goes for the Democratic Party, if you’ll allow me this leap: it has more black and brown faces (many of whom are also Christians), which says something. I want to be in a party that looks the most like the kingdom of heaven, and if an overwhelming majority of non-white voters feel heard and cared for by one side, I should pay attention.”
― Elizabeth Passarella, Good Apple: Tales of a Southern Evangelical in New York

“The miracle of letting yourself need and be needed is that you always get something out of it, either way. Neuroscientists talk about the dopamine and oxytocin hit you get from performing altruistic acts. I call it God’s mercy for my inherently selfish character. It is also, in my experience, an antidote to bitterness. When I keep my distance, I am more likely to compare and judge, and bitterness sets in. Communing is the only thing that dissolves it. We have to be in each other’s lives in uncomfortable ways to realize that the shiniest among us don’t have it all together, and the most annoying are still human.”
― Elizabeth Passarella, It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward

“brilliant, blunt, and unsentimental, which is right up my alley.”
― Elizabeth Passarella, Good Apple: Tales of a Southern Evangelical in New York

“Epilogue: "I don't need these. Not any of this." "I want this camel. This is all I'm taking just to remember him by." "Sometimes you hold on to a big thing, an overwhelming thing because you believe if you let it go you'll use the memories tucked into its walls, its boxes, its cushions and seams. You can't see the way out from under it and so you ignore the idea of parting with it and let it bend and break even further. What if you let the thing go and you lose a piece of the person who left it to you? Then circumstances tip or you get a push and you gather the courage to do it and it's easier than you anticipate. You hang on to something small. You tuck a camel in a rolling cart, some fabric scraps in a garbage bag, and you promise to find a place for it. You keep what you can carry and you make it enough.”
― Elizabeth Passarella, It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward

“Lakes in the South can be surrounded by nothing but flat fields and are the temperature of urine, which thrills me to no end.”
― Elizabeth Passarella, It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward

“If the wildness and brokenness of the past few years have taught me anything, it is that whatever you think is solid in this world will shift, and that includes your strongest-held opinions about yourself.”
― Elizabeth Passarella, It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward