Michael Stacks > Michael's Quotes

“Diocesan exams are given at the end of March to students in Catholic schools throughout Massachusetts from the fourth to the twelfth grade. You have to answer four out of seven essay questions. A typical question goes something like this: Theologians speculate about whether Christ actually appeared to His disciples after He rose from the dead. Is the scripture clear on this? Discuss, with reference to the different gospels and their variations, and to different theological interpretations”
― Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, Dodging Satan: My Irish/Italian, Sometimes Awesome, But Mostly Creepy, Childhood

“So you questioned him?" Raisa prompted. "What did he say for himself?"
"Well, the first thing Gillen does is steal his purse and beat him with a club." Amon said.”
― Cinda Williams Chima

“He brushed the hair back from her brow. “Were you scared, baby?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I knew you were coming.”
“You did?”
She touched her chest. “Your heart beats in here. If it had stopped, I would have known. It did beat a little fast sometimes.”
― Robyn Carr, Second Chance Pass

“The two men looked at each other for a moment. Then Sonja's father nodded. And Ove nodded curtly back. And then they rose to their feet, objective and determined, in the way two men might behave if they had just agreed to go and kill a third man.”
― Henning Koch, A Man Called Ove

“I considered myself a Christian. But looking back on it, I guess I was more of a Kluggist. I was klugging my own spirituality. It was years before I would find out how dangerous that was.”
― Randy Loubier, Slow Brewing Tea

“We don't have adoption issues, we have an issue with adoption.”
― Janine Myung-Ja, Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists

“Boy, you are a hothead, Bane. Your rage makes you an exceptional warrior but quite a boring conversationalist. Good thing I did not keep you for your manners and charm, eh? Now calm down, your spittle is getting all over me, my feet do not require a shower."
-Michael, The ArchAngel”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“I felt hot under my Mutton sleeves. "I just wish he'd have the decency to say whatever he came to say in front of his wife."
"Perhaps his wife is busy today."
"She shouldn't be." His wife should track him like a bloodhound.”
― Diana Forbes, Mistress Suffragette

“My brain dissolved into a puddle as I watched Lachlan. Instead of discussing the latest trends in brazen minimalism, all I could think of was placing my hand underneath that faded T-shirt and sliding my fingers over those hard pecs.”
― J.J. Sorel, A Taste of Peace

“Jennifer’s eyes begin to water again. “Don’t let anything bad happen to him, Dr. Sampson. My husband is a famous lawyer. He sues doctors when they screw up.”
“Jennifer!” Zack exclaims, embarrassed.”
― Mark M. Bello, Betrayal High

“And in that moment, I was hit with the realization that this delicate layer of atmosphere is all that protects every living thing on Earth from perishing in the harshness of space.”
― Ron Garan, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles

“Philosophy and the study of the real world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.”
― Karl Marx, German Ideology

“The very purpose of a knight is to fight on behalf of a lady.”
― Thomas Malory

“Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.”
― Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

“To the extent people prioritize values and goals such as achievement, money, power, status and image, they tend to hold more negative attitudes towards the environment, are less likely to engage in positive environmental behaviors, and are more likely to use natural resources unsustainably,”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

“Corunda Base Hospital itself continued to function on doctors, nurses, domestic staff, food preparers, and ancillary staff in the same old way, so that the patients lived (or died) in relative ignorance of the drama going on at an executive level. Indeed, it was a rare patient even knew that a hospital had executives.”
― Colleen McCullough, Bittersweet

“However, there is a way to know for certain that Noah’s Flood and the Creation story never happened: by looking at our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).  Mitochondria are the “cellular power plants” found in all of our cells and they have their own DNA which is separate from that found in the nucleus of the cell.  In humans, and most other species that mitochondria are found in, the father’s mtDNA normally does not contribute to the child’s mtDNA; the child normally inherits its mtDNA exclusively from its mother.  This means that if no one’s genes have mutated, then we all have the same mtDNA as our brothers and sisters and the same mtDNA as the children of our mother’s sisters, etc. This pattern of inheritance makes it possible to rule out “population bottlenecks” in our species’ history.  A bottleneck is basically a time when the population of a species dwindled to low numbers.  For humans, this means that every person born after a bottleneck can only have the mtDNA or a mutation of the mtDNA of the women who survived the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean that mtDNA can tell us when a bottleneck happened, but it can tell us when one didn’t happen because we know that mtDNA has a rate of approximately one mutation every 3,500 years (Gibbons 1998; Soares et al 2009). So if the human race were actually less than 6,000 years old and/or “everything on earth that breathed died” (Genesis 7:22) less than 6,000 years ago, which would be the case if the story of Adam and the story of Noah’s flood were true respectively, then every person should have the exact same mtDNA except for one or two mutations.  This, however, is not the case as human mtDNA is much more diverse (Endicott et al 2009), so we can know for a fact that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah are fictional.   There”
― Alexander Drake, The Invention of Christianity

“I was a haenyeo—independent and resilient—but I’d missed my husband.”
― Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women

“Also, he set great store on a man doing right by his family.”
― Olive Ann Burns, Cold Sassy Tree

“Debt is normal! So why be normal?”
― Dave Ramsey, The Money Answer Book: Quick Answers for Your Everyday Financial Questions (Answers to Over 100 of Your Questions on Personal Finance, Budgeting, Saving, ... How to Build Wealth)

“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“What an incorrigible nonentity one must be to play only one role in life, to occupy only one place in society, to always mean one and the same thing!”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“A story-book hero had by definition no place in life; he battered his way through twenty victorious chapters, faded out on a lustful kiss, and was gone for good.”
― Mary Stewart, Thunder on the Right