Bronwyn > Bronwyn's Quotes

“To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“How long could she be expected to stay in a remote elbow of the Welsh border, where the idea of an eligible batchelor was a man with two tractors?”
― Phil Rickman, Mean Spirit

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Steve Jobs

“A life in words”- I can’t find the origin of this phrase, but for much of my life I’ve felt this was my life: words more important than images or sounds, books way more important than real life…”
― Bronwyn Angela White

“On Christmas morning when the beach is calling and the family’s gathering and the presents are a mystery (or definitely feels book-shaped anyway), and after the splendour and celebration of Christmas Eve, we don’t want Christmas Day to be an anticlimax. We’ve gifted our Oxfam goats or geese and bought our CWS calendars, and what we’d like, on Christmas Day, what we really want, is for things to be—perfect. Just like the old days. Something new, but also something familiar.
And that’s what’s so wonderful about the Christmas story, and why preachers penning their reflections approach with trepidation but also with joy: at Christmas, the news is all good.”
― Bronwyn Angela White, Something new to say

“(from a prayer for inclusiveness):
O god whose face changes as we move and learn and change, whose image becomes less like ours and more like that of the stranger we treat as a friend; the god whom we create from the sum of all we know that is wonderful, generous, true and wise: May we see ourselves in the god-ness of others and ourselves in their image of you.”
― Bronwyn Angela White, You Who Delight Me

“Some ex-lovers you see from time to time, and it’s great to run into them; and some you’d like to run into, but they seem to avoid the stretch of road you’re on when you put your foot down...”
― Bronwyn Angela White, You Who Delight Me

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
― Terry Pratchett

“If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“The worst implication of all is that God made that catastrophe happen as part of a grand, unrevealed plan, using a child and a woman as pawns in order to teach someone else about the strength of his power. When we tell these stories as if God were looking out for the woman and not for the child, we reinforce our personal sense of security. One person has God’s blessing; another doesn”
― Gretta Vosper, Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief

“The cliché “dodged the bullet” allows us to share the relief we feel when we are lucky enough to avoid a fate we certainly wouldn’t choose. “There but for the grace of God go I” seems to say the same thing, but in stark contrast to the camaraderie of the bullet remark, the implication here is that the other person has not merited grace, has offended God, is deserving of affliction. It is Job’s friends come to needle him into acknowledging his guilt, the reason for the death of his livestock, the demise of his children, the destruction of his world. In essence, the approved, acknowledged, acceptable state to be in is a state of grace; God has noticed us and bestowed grace upon us.”
― Gretta Vosper, Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief

“Our language has folded us in half for most of our existence. We need language that will challenge us to get up from our knees, hand us back our dignity, ignite our compassion, and help us find all those crucial ways we need to live love into the world. Language that reinforces a system of belief that can drive someone back down to his knees, remove his dignity, hold him to a standard he can never meet, and silence his objection to the way things are with the promise of something no one has the right to promise unless she also has the power to bring it about is repugnant.”
― Gretta Vosper, Amen: what prayer can mean in a world beyond belief

“The future of any discipline does not survive wrapped in the trappings of the past; it can come about only when the carapace is cracked and something new, related to but distinct from what went before, is freed and allowed to thrive.”
― Gretta Vosper, With Or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe

“Will the very real consolation we have known disappear when we accept that its source is imaginary?”
― Gretta Vosper, Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief

“The church the future needs is one of people gathering to share and recommit themselves to loving relationships with themselves, their families, the wider community, and the planet. Such a church need not fear the discoveries of science, history, archaeology, psychology, or literature; it will only be enhanced by such discoveries. Such a church need not avoid the implications of critical thinking for its message; it will only become more effective. Such a church need not cling to and justify a particular source for its authority; it will draw on the wisdom of the ages and challenge divisive and destructive barriers.”
― Gretta Vosper, With Or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe

“Religion is a communal way of reimagining and remaking the self and the world. It is what we are to live by and what we are to live for. … [W]e need religion as much as ever. We need it as human, value-creating activity.”
― Gretta Vosper, Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief

“Now, personally, I don’t really get the “tell me you love me or I’ll send you to hell” message such preaching promotes. If demonstrations of love to my husband were the result of threats he’d made to my well-being, I’d recognize him as an abusive brute and also be thinking he was some sort of twisted if he really thought the “love” he got through such intimidation was of any value or meaning. If we believed in a benevolent Creator of the Universe, we would be even more surprised at such behaviour, yet it continues, to this day, to be a significant characteristic of the Christian deity.”
― Gretta Vosper, Amen: what prayer can mean in a world beyond belief

“It is time for humanists and atheists, skeptics and agnostics to see they share a common future with the many who are still comforted by their religious beliefs.”
― Gretta Vosper, With Or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe

“All life is dying life – including the life of God.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“When John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, published Honest to God in 1963, stating that he could no longer subscribe to the old personal God “out there,” there was uproar in Britain. A similar furor has greeted various remarks by David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, even though these ideas are commonplace in academic circles. Don Cupitt, Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, has also been dubbed “the atheist priest”: he finds the traditional realistic God of theism unacceptable and proposes a form of Christian Buddhism, which puts religious experience before theology. Like Robinson, Cupitt has arrived intellectually at an insight that mystics in all three faiths have reached by a more intuitive route. Yet the idea that God does not really exist and that there is Nothing out there is far from new.”
― Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

“The reason why Jesus got into such severe trouble was that he tried to bring into the present a construction of the world, of God and of the self that belonged to a still-remote future. He was much too far ahead of his time, and suffered accordingly.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return