Matt

“Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject?”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Think of it as if you were standing on one of those globes with a map on it — I always wanted one when I was a boy.”

“I understand,” she said after a minute. “When you do that, you can feel the earth turn, can’t you?”

He nodded.

“Yes. Otherwise it’s all just mañana — waiting for the morning or the moon.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Present-day Christians misinterpret the cross when they make it a nonoffensive religious symbol, a decorative object in their homes and churches. The cross, therefore, needs the lynching tree to remind us what it means when we say that God is revealed in Jesus at Golgotha, the place of the skull, on the cross where criminals and rebels against the Roman state were executed. The lynching tree is America's cross.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

“Whether theologians acknowledge it or not, all theologies begin with experience ... We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it. For when we mistake our own talk about God with ultimate reality, we turn it into ideology.”
― James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian