Bryan Prideaux > Bryan's Quotes

“You’ve been here the whole time!” I could see it clearly. 
 
The calm, glowing One smiled, and all of a sudden, I knew. It hadn’t been fear telling me not to get on the boat, scaring me away from the fun. It was Jesus trying to spare me the agony of this trip because . . . because He loves me? Yes, He loves me! 
 
And there I’d stood, as if I’d had my hand on His chest, pushing Him away. What was I doing? Seeing Him now, I realized we’d been stuck in this pose a long time. I hadn’t wanted Him to go in case I needed Him, but I hadn’t wanted Him to come inside and control me. 
 
Ever so patiently—suspended in time, but oh-so-very present—Jesus held out His hand and invited me to dance. 
 
“Yes,” I yielded, and something so much more peaceful than peace settled inside even though the storm still raged, and the circumstances hadn’t budged. “Let’s dance.” 
 
Embraced in His arms, I fell asleep—even in the midst of those crazy waves. ”
― Elizabeth Bristol, Mary Me: One Woman’s Incredible Adventure with God

“For God’s sake, the Bible says drinking is okay. “Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine.” That’s straight out of the Bible, 1 Timothy 5:23. And Ecclesiastes 9:7 instructs, “Eat your food with gladness and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do.” God approves and has no problem with you having a few glasses of wine.”
― Art Rios, Let's Talk: ...About Making Your Life Exciting, Easier, And Exceptional

“What do you do in your spare time?” Arthur asks. What is it with this guy? Hope flinches, feeling less like she’s been interviewed and more like she’s been whiplashed. The spare time question was code for questions, you were, by law, not allowed to ask. Did she read books to sick kids? Find housing for the homeless? Support underprivileged women to build careers? Did she have a demanding husband? Two kids under five? And aging mother? But Hope had never put down stakes, either in the home or the do-good camp. Where she came from, at the end of a workweek, a person deserved a cold beer and some down time. “What spare time?”
― Joan Gelfand, Extreme

“If you can't prove your freedom in the nanosecond before you spilled rage out of your lips, you have proven your bondage.”
― Randy Loubier, Slow Brewing Tea

“People can drift far away from themselves but eventually tether again.”
― Lee Matthew Goldberg, The Ancestor

“Men and women will forever make gods of others rather than see the god in themselves.”
― Ki Longfellow, The Secret Magdalene

“Then they began saying, "Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury." Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, "Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“Trapped in silence, Marco traces apologies and adorations across Celia's body with his tongue. Mutely expressing all the things he cannot speak aloud.
He finds other ways to tell her, his fingers leaving faint trails of ink in their wake. He savors every sound he elicits from her.
The entire room trembles as they come together.
And though there are a great many fragile objects contained within it, nothing breaks.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“The greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. It's actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what's killing us.”
― Eve Ensler

“Calvin: The more you know, the harder it is to take decisive action.
Once you are informed, you start seeing complexities and shades of gray.
You realize nothing is as clear as it first appears. Ultimately, knowledge is paralyzing.
Being a man of action, I cannot afford to take that risk.

Hobbes: You're ignorant, but at least you act on it.”
― Bill Watterson, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

“God knows I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with any one. But God knows I had and I lay on the bed in the room of the hospital in Milan and all sorts of things went through my head but I felt wonderful...”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Everything was going along just fine until Mama caught me cutting out of the circles of tin with her scissors. I always swore she could find the biggest switches of any woman in the Ozarks.”
― Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows

“I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important,
and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him,
he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply
the fact that there are no brick and no temples. Any visible expression
of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.

Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the
desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one
knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself.”
― Stephen Crane, Open Boat

“The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I sat this afternoon to read during the boys’ nap. I was going through the botanical theory book, and while I was reading I remembered something Blue Horse said to me back before Gilbert was born. He said wisdom is not a path, it is a tree. At the time I was too busy to give it much thought, so I nodded politely but didn’t pay much attention. Now I see that he was surely right. I have been sad almost a whole year, thinking that taking that test was somehow the end of my learning and that not having that as a possibility in my future left a big empty spot in my life that the children and the ranch didn’t fill. But my life is not like that, it is a tree, and I can stay in one place and spread out in all directions, and I can do more learning shading this brood of mine than if I was all alone. I declare, it is like some other part of me made up some rules about happiness and I just went along with them without thinking. My heart is lightened so much that I am amazed at how sad I felt for so long.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words

“I wonder,” he said, “whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again...”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Life, too, is senseless unless you know who you are, what you want, and which way the wind blows.”
― Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game

“Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“He looked up and saw her and his breath stopped in his throat. His hands stopped too, still spread above the keyboard. Harpsichord notes do not carry, and in the sudden quiet of the drawing room they both heard him take his next breath.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“A standing prick hath no conscience. And if that standing prick is attached to Bruce Robertson then it hath less than no conscience. You can't afford a conscience in this life, that has become a luxury for the rich and a social ball and chain for the rest of us. Even if I wanted one, which I certainly do not, I wouldn't have the faintest idea as how to go about getting one.”
― Irvine Welsh, Filth

“Do you think any of us know how to love?! Do you think anybody would ever do anything if they waited until they knew how to love?! Do you think that babies would ever get made or meals cooked or crops planed or books written or what God-damn-have-you? Do you think people would even get out of bed in the morning if they waited until they knew how to love? You have had too much therapy. Or not enough. God knows how to love, kiddo. The rest of us are only good actors.

Forget love. Try good manners.”
― Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

“guillotine”
― Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

“The world is full of magic. You’ve just got to learn how to access it.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“I can’t do more than this. Don’t ask me. If you ask, I’ll try and I’ll fail. You’ll end up hating me. And I’d rather die . . . than have you hate me. Or disappoint you. My own darkness, it still chips away at me.”
― J. Rose Black, Losing My Breath

“You need them. Mother’s words ring through my mind.”
― Tricia Copeland, To be a Fae Guardian

“She wore people down like waves wore down stone.
Consistent. Patient. Relentless. Merciless.
       ”
― D.L. Maddox, The Dog Walker: The Prequel

“Colonel Aubertin and his two colleagues sat on a park bench in the private garden of Dorset Square. Rougemont sat between his two superiors, pleased that for once the commandant appeared to have had an abstemious lunch. “Major Vane-Stewart was telling me the other day that this was once the site of the first important cricket ground in London, established by the same Thomas Lord who later built the famous ground that bears his name, a few miles to the north of us in St. John’s Wood. There is a plaque recording this fact in that shed over there. In the middle of the square.”
“Cricket.” Angers spat out the words with disgust. “A stupid game played by idiots. Only the English could invent such a boring name.”
― Mark Ellis, The French Spy

“Para entonces ya estaba muerta. En realidad, puede que llevara muerta mucho tiempo. Físicamente, solo unos segundos; mentalmente toda una vida.”
― Koushun Takami, Battle Royale

“Another morning comes. It always does. Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds. Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with. *”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown