The Library Writer > The Library Writer's Quotes

“Love is the story and the prayer that matters the most.”
― Brian Doyle, The Wet Engine: Exploring Mad Wild Miracle of Heart

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall.”
― Brian Doyle

“It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I think a father’s job, when it’s done best, is to get down on both knees, lean over his children’s lives, and whisper, ‘Where do you want to go?’ Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure. It’s not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us. God asks what it is He’s made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that deep indescribable need of our souls to experience the richness of the world He made. And then, leaning over us, He whispers, ‘Let’s go do THAT together.”
― Bob Goff

“The Catholic Church tries to shut down the discussion of women priests by saying that Jesus chose men as his apostles at the Last Supper, and therefore only men are allowed to be priests. But we could as easily say that the Risen Christ appeared first to a woman and told her to go tell the men, and therefore only women are allowed to bring the Good News to the men.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”
― Anne Lamott

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.”
― Anne Lamott

“When you are sitting on a three-legged stool and you've kicked out all three legs, but you're still sitting upright, must you assume that you're so good, you levitate? Or must you assume that you were sitting on the ground all along?”
― Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Complete Poems

“Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure. It's not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us. God asks what it is He's made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that deep indescribable need of our souls to experience the richness of the world He made. And then, leaning over us, He whispers, "Let's go do that together.”
― Bob Goff

“I used to think you had to be special for God to use you, but now I know you simply need to say yes.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“It has always seemed to me that broken things, just like broken people, get used more; it's probably because God has more pieces to work with.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“Actually, the real game of Bigger and Better that Jesus is playing with us usually isn’t about money or possessions or even our hopes. It’s about our pride. He asks if we’ll give up that thing we’re so proud of, that thing we believe causes us to matter in the eyes of the world, and give it up to follow Him. He’s asking us, “Will you take what you think defines you, leave it behind, and let Me define who you are instead?”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“It is unclear to me what happened, but I am often confused by Americans, so let’s pretend everything is fine and go to look at the garden.”
― Abbi Waxman, The Garden of Small Beginnings

“Poverty is not being able to protect your family. Poverty is not being able to save your children when mothers with more money could. And because the strongest instinct of a mother is to protect her children, poverty is the most disempowering force on earth.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“It's the mark of a backward society - or a society moving backward - when decisions are made for women by men.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“It is especially galling that some of the people who want to cut funding for contraceptives cite morality. In my view, there is no morality without empathy, and there is certainly no empathy in this policy. Morality is loving your neighbor as yourself, which comes from seeing your neighbor as yourself, which means trying to ease your neighbor’s burdens—not add to them.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“To bring about a revolution of the heart, you have to let your heart break. Letting your heart break means sinking into the pain that’s underneath the anger.... If you don’t accept the suffering, hurt can turn to hatred.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World