Alison > Alison's Quotes

“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
― Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence

“The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”
― Brenda Ueland

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“The field of honor is a painful field...(It) is not a place where children can play. Children don't have any honor, you see, and they aren't expected to, because it's too difficult for them. It's too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person - a person without honor - might take. Such an instance may hurt, but that's why honor is a painful field.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Success and failure, ultimately, have little to do with living the gospel. Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified — whichever came first.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be some lives out there that matter less than other lives.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we'll find the God that exists behind them.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Each of us must find a way to love the world. You have found yours.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“You'll be devastated and grief-stricken, but there's a place in you that is inviolate-it's the surest part of you, a piece of Sophia herself. You'll find your way there, when you need to. And you'll know then what I speak of.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“That’s why the Bible is not a book about going to heaven. The action is here. The life is here. The point is here. It’s a library of books about the healing and restoring and reconciling and renewing of this world. Our home.”
― Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

“What does it mean to never be separated from love? Is that how you live every day? In every thought, are you constantly reminded that love is the ground of your being?”
― Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

“Because when you can’t hear the cry, when you stop caring for the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you, it always leads to the diminishing of your empire.”
― Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

“People wrote these stories down because they found in them something that helped restore their dignity; the stories gave them a sense of identity; they helped give voice to their pain.”
― Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

“Because the Jesus message is first and foremost an announcement of who you are. It’s about your identity, about the new word that has been spoken about you, the love that has always been yours. If you start with instructions and commands, people might be mistaken into thinking that God loves us because of what we do or how religious or moral or good we are. That’s not gospel. Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You’re a child of God, not because of how great you are but because God has all kinds of kids and you’re one of them.”
― Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

“This story... blasts to pieces our biases and labels with a declaration that God is on everyone's side, extending grace and compassion to everyone, especially those we have most strongly decided are not on God's side.”
― Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

“What will you do with your power and wealth and might and armies? What kind of world will you create with it? Will you use it to manipulate and overpower others to build your empire even bigger, or will you use it to help the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you?”
― Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

“The point of the Abraham-and-Isaac story isn’t that you should sacrifice your kid but that you can leave behind any notion of a god who demands that you sacrifice your kid.”
― Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

“When people charge in with great insistence that this is God’s word all the while neglecting the very real humanity of these books, they can inadvertently rob these writings of their sacred power. All because of starting in the wrong place. You start with the human. You ask those questions, you enter there, you direct your energies to understanding why these people wrote these books. Because whatever divine you find in it, you find the divine through and in the human, not around it.”
― Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“When there is no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Neurosurgery seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity, and death.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“To make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don't expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Music doesn't get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn't necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Other animals don’t have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn’t progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time