Michaela Bunke

“Though I had agreed with every word, there was one part that rang strongly discordant in my mind: "I've watched carefully and listened to my grandfather and those who oppose him. My grandfather's Bible-preaching is more agreeable to my heart." We never appealed to our own thoughts or feelings as reliable evidence of truth, and we routinely disparaged others for doing so. The Bible was true because it was true, regardless of how I-or anyone else - felt about it or any of its teachings. This had been a theme of my life, oft-repeated by my mother: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
There was always urgent warning in my mother's voice when she quoted this passage: we could not trust our hearts.
Our feelings would lead us astray. Why had Margie written that sentence? I'd been almost physically repulsed by it, and watching my nieces bound across the field as we arrived at the park, I was finally able to pinpoint why: my sixteen-year-old self had started to recognize the contradiction. We used our hearts to authenticate the moral truth of the Bible - the same Bible that told us our hearts were deceitful. I shook my head as I realized that all we had was our hearts. In writing that sentence, Margie had unwittingly betrayed that at bottom-resting beneath all the chapters and verses that we'd spent years quoting and memorizing-the foundation of it all was a belief that our hearts had led us true when they told us the Bible was the answer.
Our unreliable, desperately wicked, deceitful hearts.”
― Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope

“Those were my thoughts when I heard the sound of a vio-lin. A violin in a dark barrack where the dead were piled on top of the living? Who was this madman who played the violin here, at the edge of his own grave? Or was it a hallucination?
It had to be Juliek.
He was playing a fragment of a Beethoven concerto. Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence.
How had he succeeded in disengaging himself? To slip out
from under my body without my feeling it?
The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin, and it was as if Juliek's soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. He played that which he would never play again.
I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.
I don't know how long he played. I was overcome by sleep.
When I awoke at daybreak, I saw Juliek facing me, hunched over, dead. Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“She was already in love with him. She’s sure a shrink would smile and say it was a daddy thing. If so, Janie would smile right back and tell him that was a load of Freudian bullshit. Her father was a bald accountant who was barely there even when he was there. And one thing you can say about Bill Hodges is that he’s there.”
― Stephen King

“I, an unstable and uncertain man, had been steered into leadership in an institution that laid claim to transcendental levels of stability and certainty. Maybe that was one of the attractions, but it would not have needed a clairvoyant to predict that there would be trouble ahead.”
― Richard Holloway, Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt