Many times, you are the single most significant and glorious thing that has ever happened in the lives of some people; they sit around and talk about you over and over again throughout the years while you are out there living your life, every step th...
Choose your battles wisely. After all, life isn't measured by how many times you stood up to fight. It's not winning battles that makes you happy, but it's how many times you turned away and chose to look into a better direction. Life is too short to...
I suggest that people walk around under the moon barefoot, as I have today. There's that voice of your mom and dad and aunt and big sister and uncle and annoying cousin in your ear saying "Your feet are going to get dirty and you're going to turn int...
If people want something to be wrong about you— they are going to make things wrong about you. That is why it is my belief to never try and prove anything to anyone. Real diamonds belong to people who know how to spot a real diamond; they don’t b...
There are certain things I can't do, certain pitches I can't hit. You stay away from them. You try to wait for pitches you can hit. The bat speed isn't what it used to be. You make up for it by using your head, working counts, getting ahead in counts...
Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say r...
The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up...
So you will meet many ’someones’ who will give a new definition to your name. And you can not build walls, must not close the door and please don’t hide, because if you ask me about hurt and love I will say love. Love because the hurt will come...
It is the great business of every Christian to save souls. People complain that they do not know how to take hold of this matter. Why, the reason is plain enough; they have never studied it. They have never taken the proper pains to qualify themselve...
They get quieter over the years. They still whisper to you sometimes, but the world gets louder. You can see it and hear it again. There's a gap in it, where they used to be. But you get used to the gap; so used to it that you can hardly see it. And ...
I have many dead people who talk to me, whisper advice into my ears in the finest of moments. I take their advice in the moments where life shouldn't allow you to make your own business. This is one of those moments. The dead whisperer, Eleanor Roose...
One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience, and experience has made them cautious in their conversation with their teachers. Will you not draw ...
Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that a...
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact s...
Lefever describes his financing plan with modesty: "'Our detailed budget is realistic, but does not take into account the inflation that may occur before September 1983. The one place it could cut or reduce is item 7, the simultaneous interpreter ser...
It’s natural to think of one’s own life as a novel (or a movie or a play), and within that narrative we are always the central character. Thoughtful people try to overcome this compulsion, but they usually fail (in fact, trying makes it worse). I...
(on teaching writing) So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well - but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the mor...
After a while he said: It’s not about knowin where you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody’s. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Ever step you take is fore...
It's not about surviving. It should be about love. When you know love...that's what makes this life worth it. When you live with it everyday. Wake up with it, hold on to it during the thunder and after a nightmare. When love is your refuge from the d...
Jesus didn't come to earth to establish a new religion. He came to restore a broken relationship. He came to make the primary, primary again. The secondary activity of obedience to the law of God was always intended to serve the primary activity: to ...
Grace has to be the loveliest word in the English language. It embodies almost every attractive quality we hope to find in others. Grace is a gift of the humble to the humiliated. Grace acknowledges the ugliness of sin by choosing to see beyond it. G...
