Suzanne > Suzanne's Quotes

“Rumpole, you must move with the times."

"If I don't like the way the times are moving, I shall refuse to accompany them.”
― John Mortimer, The Anti-Social Behaviour of Horace Rumpole

“If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.”
― John C Wright

“No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.”
― Elizabeth Peters

“Marriage, in my view, should be a balanced stalemate between equal adversaries.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Mummy Case

“The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion

“The problem is not that we have so little power. The problem is that we don't use the power that we have.”
― Danusha V. Goska

“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.”
― Maeve Binchy

“I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?”
― Jean Kerr

“Egerton taught her how to approach a challenging book. She should read and reread slowly, making marginal notes when she came across something important, and mark things she didn't understand. He instructed her to think over each evening what she had read that day and jot down her ideas about it. She was a willing and eager pupil”
― Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge, The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton

“The arts and humanities are not mere entertainment, to be turned to for relaxation after a busy day spent solving differential equations; they are our templates for living, for governing ourselves and our societies. Nor can science offer any help with the knottier problems besetting the human race. It can remedy bad smells, bad pains, and bad roads, but not bad behavior, bad government, or bad ideas.”
― John Derbyshire

“What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.”
― Mark Twain

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them. ”
― Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
― Albert Einstein

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
― Winston Churchill

“Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.”
― Benedict of Nursia, The Rule of Saint Benedict

“The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.”
― Harold Clarke Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back.”
― Abigail Van Buren

“Everyone, at some time or another, sits down to a banquet of consequences. ”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

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

“God never sends suffering. Never. It is never "God's will" that we should suffer. God would like us not to suffer. But since the world brings suffering, and since God refuses to use His almighty power and treat us as foolish children, He aligns Himself with us, goes into Auschwitz with us, is devastated by 9/11 with us, and draws us with Him through it all into fulfillment. This is a high price to pay for our human freedom, but it is worth it. To be mere automatons for whom God arranges the world to cause us no suffering would mean we never have a self. We could not make choices.”
― Wendy Beckett

“The Church is always God hung between two thieves. Thus, no one should be surprised or shocked at how badly the church has betrayed the gospel and how much it continues to do so today. It had never done very well. Conversely, however, nobody should deny the good the church has done either. It has carried grace, produced saints, morally challenged the planet, and made, however imperfectly, a house for God to dwell in on this earth.

To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child molesters, murderers, adulterers, and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with the saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race, and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul...because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.”
― Ronald Rolheiser

“I am different, not less.”
― Temple Grandin

“But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.

No, said Tolkien, they are not.

...just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.

You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.”
― Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

“He's a good boy, he takes instruction well; I just can't think of enough things to tell him not to do.”
― Ferrol Sams, Run with the Horsemen