Tonya Deterline > Tonya's Quotes

“Past regrets may not be correctable, but sometimes for a writer the pain of his or her failure can be softened by the work of his hand.”
― Paul A. Barra

“She peeped through one of the small holes in the outer wall rising up from the walkway. The world on the outside was nothing but countryside now. Dirt roads, like chocolate ribbons, disappeared into woods or green fields in the distance.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“Jesus is telling us that redemption is more than having our sins forgiven; it is an intimate relationship He came to restore between us and God. If we are going to live out the first and greatest commandment of loving God completely (Matt. 22:36-37), this is the type of experiential intimacy which ought to be the objective of our lives.”
― Ami Loper, Constant Companion: Your Practical Path to Real Interaction with God

“And Tarquin,’ Semilla said quietly. ‘He has been in league with them all along?’
‘Yes, I am afraid so,’ Rupert confirmed.”
― A.R. Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“Solitude led to retrospective thinking, and if the past is what you are trying to get away from, then constant distractions in the present are needed.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“8. Sylva suddenly remembered one of the teachings of Martha that she had copied out. The person who listens, gains wisdom – She who just talks only expels air. Naomi had told Sylva that she should let Martha’s words guide her. Maybe she was correct. Anyway, what harm could it do to spend a few moments listening to the huntsman?”
― Robert Reid, The Empress

“Nothing looked disturbed…yet everything felt that way. The guy was on the bed, calmness itself, as though he’d decided on a moment’s lie-down and just zizzed off.”
― Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows

“Remember, your mission is to love, expecting nothing in return.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“The fire burned on under the cauldron of our culture, and the next doubling of our population would only take 1200 years (0-1200 CE). There would be 400 million humans at the end of it, 98% belonging to our culture, East and West. War, plague, famine, political corruption, unrest, crime and economic instability were fixtures of our culture life and would remain so. I am not collecting signals of human evil. These are all reactions to overcrowding- too many people competing for too few resources, eating rotten food, drinking fouled water, watching their families starve, etc. The ordinary people of the Western empires were ready when the first great salvationist religion of the West arrived on its doorstep. It was easy for them to envision humankind as innately flawed and envision themselves in need of salvation.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we
are. They are different. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“And there it was. He knew it, and I knew it. There was nothing left for me to do. Do you know how hard it is to say nothing ? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak...”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“written by one Willard Waller and published in 1932—contains the terms of a contract that female teachers in “a certain southern community” had to sign in the early 1930s. The contract obligated the teacher to engage in “all phases of Sunday-school work,” to get at least eight hours of sleep while maintaining a healthy diet, and to consider herself “at all times the willing servant of the school board and the townspeople.” She had to promise not to go out dancing, not to “dress immodestly,” not to be in the company of “any young man” outside Sunday school, and not to “encourage or tolerate the least familiarity from her male pupils.” The contract also contained this provision: I promise not to fall in love, to become engaged or secretly married.”
― Tracy Kidder, Among Schoolchildren

“The spiritual man is trying to free himself from the materiality that is the cause of his prodigal wandering in the maze of incarnations, but the ordinary man does not want more than a betterment of his earthly existence.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, The Yoga of Jesus: Understanding the Hidden Teachings of the Gospels

“Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”
― Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993