Jennifer

“You do the duty of the tasks at hand,” he lectured himself in a whisper, prompting the man sitting opposite to lift his eyes from the Times. “You keep faith with your responsibilities and your vocation, and you love the souls you’ve brought into the world, and the souls God brings into your life. You work and you pray. You try to turn everything into prayer, and you practice hope. You keep your eyes trained on the true horizon.” Anyway, that was his theory—one that he believed was true. The praxis was more difficult.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, The Sabbatical: A Novel

“For he saw now that his true ugliness had been withdrawn by his Lord while he wept. His misshapen body remained but men would not again shrink from him. What they had shrunk from had been his own sin of self-hatred, that had made him like a beaten cur in their presence. Why should he hate himself, since God had loved him enough to die for him? He would go back into the world, and smile at all the folk in it, and love them with the same love, and they would no longer shrink from him. When their bodies were sick they would even put themselves gladly into his hands, as the creatures did. He held out his hands and looked at them, remembering how they had treated his Lord.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“Revenge is not a straight line, it’s a circle. It’s a grenade that goes off while you’re still in the room, and you can’t help but be caught in the blast.”
― Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice

“Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Who knows what keeps us living and struggling, while all things break about us? Who knows why the warm flesh of a child is such comfort, when one’s own child is lost and cannot be recovered? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom. Oh God, my God, do not Thou forsake me. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, if Thou art with me….”
― Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country