All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And tha...
There is no question of doing is purely on our own. But we must act. Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort. And it is well-directed, decisive, and sustained effort that is the key to the keys of the kingdom and to the life of restful power in mi...
I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more inti...
Jesus came to save me from myself. He came to save me from self-effort. He didn't just die for my sin to give me forgiveness; he rose again to give me life.
You don't get to say goodbye. Not now, maybe not ever. That's the beauty of this arrangement. I make all the decisions and you're left to wander around in the dark, waiting, anticipating and fearing my next move. Only when I'm done using you and I’...
Why do you want to keep this beauty for yourself? Why don’t you want to share it? The world is made of shared grace and harmony. Look at the sun shining, at the bees flying, the flowers blossoming. What would happen if they were ashamed like you ar...
Charlie whistled "Amazing Grace" as he drove. It was all I could do not to whip my head around and snap, Are you kidding me? Couldn't he pick something more appropriate, like "Shout at the Devil" or "Don't fear the Reaper"? Some people had no sense o...
We are often at odds with our wise and loving Lord because the change he is working on is not the change we have dreamt about. We dream about change in it, while God is working in the midst of it to change us.
But I know how much you care for me. I read it in the ribbon. Lorcan sighed. Did you really need to read the ribbon to know that I cared for you?, he said. Really, Grace, don't you know me at all? I thought I did, she said
My last words to him were to assure him that we would bring Sally to join him later. And you know what your dad said? He said that he would wait for as long as it took." Grace bit her lip. "But she never came, did she? And he never stopped waiting.
Nico remembered something Jason Grace had told him in the palace of Notus: Maybe it’s time you come out of the shadows. If only I could, he thought. For the first time in his life, he had begun to fear the dark, because he might melt into it perman...
My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, 'I'm going to go home and hug my child a little ...
A little girl loves her bird--Why? Because it lives and feels; because it is helpless and harmless? A toad, likewise, lives and feels, and is equally helpless and harmless; but though she would not hurt a toad, she cannot love it like the bird, with ...
Mankind in the aggregate I have found to be brutish, ignorant and unkind, whether those qualities were covered by the coarse tunic of the peasant of the white and purple toga of a senator. And yet in the weakest of men, in moments when they are alone...
Were God to show grace to all of Adam's descendants, men would at once conclude that He was righteously compelled to take them to heaven as meet compensation for allowing the human race to fall into sin. But the great God in under no obligation to an...
Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and ...
I was used to being invisible. People rarely saw me, and if they did, they never looked close. I wasn't shiny and charming like my brother, stunning and graceful like my mother, or smart and dynamic like my friends. That's the thing, though. You alwa...
The weathered dairy barn, the wilted chicken coop, the leaning corn crib, the corroded silos-- all were revealed as structures of utility and grace. Someone must have rigged Ry's perception so that he had spent his whole life seeing only the ultimate...
In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and ...
I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to t...
Though I normally approve of plain speaking, as you know, I would suggest that as part of your good behavior, you refer to the king as 'his grace' or even simply 'the king' instead of 'that creature,' by the way.
