Joel > Joel's Quotes

“There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

“To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means.”
― Brennan Manning

“In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“Be careful,” warned Nietzsche, “lest in fighting the dragon you become the dragon.” I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.”
― Philip Yancey, Christians and Politics Uneasy Partners

“He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

“Today the danger of the pro-life position, which I vigorously support, is that it can be frighteningly selective. The rights of the unborn and the dignity of the age-worn are pieces of the same pro-life fabric. We weep at the unjustified destruction of the unborn. Did we also weep when the evening news reported from Arkansas that a black family had been shotgunned out of a white neighborhood.

When we laud life and blast abortionists, our credibility as Christians is questionable. On one hand we proclaim the love and anguish, the pain and joy that goes into fashioning a single child. We proclaim how precious each life is to God and should be to us. On the other hand, when it is the enemy that shrieks to heaven with his flesh in flames, we do not weep, we are not shamed; we call for more”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

“Ragamuffins are simple, direct and honest. Their speech is unaffected. They are slow to claim, "God told me..." As they make their way through the world, they bear wordless, prophetic witness.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

“Yes, I began my journey alone, and I ended it alone.
But that does not mean that I walked alone.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“But are there not many fascists in your country?"
"There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the times comes.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“This moment will just be another story someday.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I exist.’ In thousands of agonies — I exist. I’m tormented on the rack — but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar — I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You are, and always have been, my dream.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds. And that's what you've given me. That's what I'd hoped to give you forever”
― Nicholas Sparks

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, “Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?” would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago; but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“At the heart of the gospel is a God who deliberately surrenders to the wild, irresistable power of love.”
― Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?

“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“Even when this world is a forgotten whisper of dust between the stars, I will always love you.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Empire of Storms