Erin Bottger (Bouma)

“I remember a young man coming to see me when he had just left school and begun work in London. He had given up going to church, he said, because he could not say the creed without feeling that he was a hypocrite. He no longer believed it. When he had finished telling me what he thought, I said to him, ‘If I were to answer your problems to your complete intellectual satisfaction, would you be willing to change the way you live?’ He smiled slightly and blushed. The answer was clearly ‘No’. His real problem was not intellectual but moral. This, then, is the spirit in which our search must be conducted. We must set aside apathy, pride, prejudice and sin, and seek God – no matter what the consequences. Of all these hindrances to the search for truth, the last two are the hardest to overcome: intellectual prejudice and moral self-will. The reason is that both are expressions of fear – and fear is the greatest enemy of the truth.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself . . . You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
― Angela Carter

“Wholeness is the goal [of life], but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”
― Parker J. Palmer, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”
― Maurice Sendak