Robby

“Here, perhaps, is the only man in the world who, were you to leave him alone and without money on the square of some unknown city with a population of a million, would not perish, would not die of cold and hunger, for he would immediately be fed and immediately be taken care of, and if no one else took care of him, he would immediately take care of himself, and it would cost him no effort, and no humiliation, and he would be no burden to those who took care of him, who perhaps, on the contrary, would consider it a pleasure.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

“Let him who cannot be alone beware of community... Let him who is not in community beware of being alone... Each by itself has profound perils and pitfalls. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation and despair.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community

“In participation we first reach out and take the whole world into our hands. We lift the Alpha and Omega to our mouth. We take God’s whole story into our stomach, let it run through our bloodstream, let it then energize our entire living—our relationships, our work, our pleasure—all of life is to be lived now as Jesus lived his life for us, and for our sake, dying for us, rising for us, showing us how to live in the pattern of his dying and rising. As he took into himself the suffering of all humanity, so we are to take into ourselves the suffering of the world and do something about it. As he rose above all that is evil in the world through his resurrection, so we, too, are to rise to the new life by the Spirit of God. All our death to sin and rising to life finds its true and ultimate meaning in him who lives in us, living in our sufferings, living in our struggles with evil, living in our resurrections to new life.”
― Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace (Ancient-Future): Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life

“Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.”
― Ann Patchett