Andrew Breza

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“This past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful.

I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering – enough is certainly as good as a feast – but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth – and indeed, no church – can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable.

This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worse that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.”
― James Baldwin

“I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven’t actually read it.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

“This is the great failing of today’s evangelical lobby. Instead of testifying confidently to the presence of a supreme and sovereign God—a celestial chess master rolling His eyes at our earthly checkerboard—Christian conservatives have acted like toddlers lost at the shopping mall, panicked and petrified, shouting the name of their father with such hysteria that his reputation is diminished in the eyes of every onlooker.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism