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Book cover for How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That’s Great News
Rulebook answers deliver certitude and finality, but wisdom embraces mystery. Rulebook answers are distant and passive, but wisdom is intimate and learned through experience. Rulebook answers are immediate, but wisdom takes trial and error ...more
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Nora Ephron
“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

J.R.R. Tolkien
“I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.' A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. 'For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

Harper Lee
“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Elizabeth Gaskell
“He knew how she would love. He had not loved her without gaining that instinctive knowledge of what capabilities were in her. Her soul would walk in glorious sunlight if any man was worthy, by his power of loving, to win back her love.”
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

Antonio Machado
“Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road-- Only wakes upon the sea.

Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más; caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar.”
Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla

year in books
Karen F...
1,092 books | 107 friends

Annagrace
1,695 books | 68 friends

Michelle
1,210 books | 32 friends

Ryan
542 books | 79 friends

Deb
Deb
403 books | 85 friends

Cris
877 books | 138 friends

Jeffrey
670 books | 83 friends

Kristi ...
354 books | 52 friends

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