The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nat...
We must work for the good and commit ourselves to postures of global selflessness, even if we can't figure out all the details surrounding the foreign dictators, food shortages, and fair trade. We're called to lean in, to work as hard as we can towar...
It's funny, I don't feel any older than I did when I was twenty. But I know I am, because recently some twenty-year-old called me 'sir.' Sometimes the only way you know you are getting older is by the way others treat you.
Who you affect is more powerful than who you are at any given moment. Nothing is as enduring as a great memory. In the end, its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, and feelings that last. Stone cracks. Wood rots. Skin dies. But great thoughts, ...
Cheshire Cat: All ways here you see, are the QUEEN'S WAYS! Alice: But I've never met any queen. Cheshire Cat: You haven't? You ha-VEN'T? Oh, but you must! She'll be mad about you, simply mad! [chuckles, then rolls over and almost disappears] Cheshire...
Simon hated her for that. Perhaps it was automatic. Her appearance alone made her different from him, and human beings had always feared and hated anyone who was different. Two thousand years of history saw it being repeated over and over, the perpet...
One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manner...
And so sovereign Providence has often produced a remarkable effect--evil men making other evil men good. For some, when they think they suffer injustice at the hands of the worst of men, burn with hatred for evil men, and being eager to be different ...
In Korea I’d been so afraid that Sami would lose her dad. She did, but she didn’t get a flag. He went to Doha, then to Baghdad, then to Kabul, then to someplace else, and then to a different someplace else, on and on. He’d come home, leave agai...
Once," Fran says, settling against the worktable, folding her arms, "I knew this kid who very bravely and bossily came out of the closet when she was only fourteen years old. She told me then that we can't choose who we love. We just love the people ...
A gentleman of ambition is aware of the people he wishes to be associated with both socially and commercially. He knows that moving through different levels of society is akin to stepping through different rooms in an enormous house, each door leadin...
Elle, you have a pure heart. You possess love and compassion for your friends and for people you have never met. You have made a huge difference in the lives of fifteen widows and their children. Those children will now grow up safely and be able to ...
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up wit...
I have lived long enough to see real, significant changes made for the good...and I have been fortunate enough to have participated in some of them...One person can make a difference! (Father Ted Hesburgh, C.S.C., quoted in our book, God's Icebreaker...
And then Jonah heard God’s voice. “Jonah, do you know what the difference is between you and the trees?” He was confident it was God because God usually asked questions but gave no answers. Jonah didn’t need a divine answer to this question, ...
Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing...
The blazing sun beat down on the concrete of the museum's front yard- Reverend Ryu Yosop felt as if the heat were sucking up all the moisture in his brain and heart. What different colors he and his brother Yohan must have used as each of them painte...
Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitc...
Did I ever tell you the difference between a Northern fairy tale and a Southern one?" she asked him, indulging herself and letting her head rest on his shoulder. God, he felt good. Her man. Where her head was meant to lie, right there, on him. "What'...
The difference between sex with David and sex with Stephen is like the difference between science and art. With Stephen it's all empathy and imagination and exploration and the shock of the new, and the outcome is... uncertain, if you know what I mea...
Someone has said of books that they are our 'amplest heritages' of thought, and so they are. That doesn't necessarily mean that they must be learned or profound. They are food for the mind and different minds require different foods ; everyone is bet...