And God is always calling me to open myself to all kinds of people that I've never thought about before and also calling me on this inward spiritual journey.
What I count as real prosperity... is the growth in a knowledge of God, and in a testimony, and in the power to live the gospel and to inspire our families to do the same. That is prosperity of the truest kind.
There is but one kind of love; God is love, and all his creatures derive theirs from his; only it is modified by the different degrees of intelligence in different beings and creatures.
I had years of partying, and I was kind of surprised and happy I survived it all. Now, being a parent, I look back on it thinking, Oh God, the things you did!
It is up to God to take revenge. Only God can judge. I don't have to worry about getting even with anybody or taking out any kind of aggression on anybody. Doing that is a weakness, anyway.
I want to live outside of the box, and I definitely don't want to put God in a box, so I want to be able to dream big and kind of let that go of my small-mindedness.
It is always encouraging and kind when people say nice things about my work but I know that it is not me that did it then and it is not me that is doing it now. It is God living in me and for that I will always be grateful.
The whole Bible is the story of men and women trying to get back to God, to overcome that sin with sacrifices, good works, sermons, prophesy, witnessing, giving all kinds of things. It never worked.
I believe in a kind of God. I think all scientists, in a way, believe in a certain God, in a certain order of nature.
I don't know what kind of God the rest of y'all are serving, but the God I serve says, 'Mary, you need to be the hottest thing this year, and I'm gonna make sure you're doing that.'
A lot of America is kind of done. People have been making films about it for 100 years. Everything to me feels used up. But Jo-Burg feels unbelievably inspirational to me.
If you are going to have to play defense all the time, you cannot have the kind of ingenuity, assertiveness, independence, and intelligence which is what has made our country strong.
The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.
If I could have been a marine biologist I would have, but I didn't have that kind of intelligence. Numbers were never my strong point.
I think it's important to get your surroundings as well as yourself into a positive state - meaning surround yourself with positive people, not the kind who are negative and jealous of everything you do.
Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.
So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.
I grew up in Oregon so I grew up around reservations, so I've always kind of had this knowledge. Not a tremendous amount of knowledge, but an outsider's knowledge of what reservation life was like.
My mom took me to see Carnal Knowledge and The Wild Bunch and all these kind of movies when I was a kid.
As for leadership, I am the kind who leads reluctantly and more by example than anything else. Someone had to be on the incorporation papers as president.
Generally, I think most of my writing tends to have some kind of magical element to it. That's the way I can access the emotional life of the character.
