The personal desolation Christ is experiencing on the cross is what you and I should be experiencing--but instead, Jesus is bearing it, and bearing it all alone. Why alone? He's alone so that we might never be alone.
She emerged from the shadows like an apparition, and he was taken aback by her beauty. Never in his wildest dreams had he expected to chance upon such a vision of loveliness in those harsh and unforgiving mountains. Her beautiful face, long black hai...
But never has the Call been so clear As now, when death’s cool hand Eases my spirit from my fevered body-- And I answer the Call of the Master— The Call to new Heights.
Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than ...
Don’t you know that’s what college is about...students spending years gathering useless information they’ll never use again, going hopelessly into debt, just so they feel smarter than the rest of their family? I mean, that’s why I worked so h...
The things that really shake the human soul aren't beauty or kindness. Although such things are certainly moving, but those feelings don't last long. But... anger or sadness are different. They leave an undelible mark. Even after the wound heals... y...
I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.
Yes! That's what all our talk about a decent world has been... just so much bullshit." "We did say it was still only a dream." "And a bloody useless one at that. Life's a fuck-up and it's never going to change.
Miss Prendregast!” He rapped on his desk with his knuckles. “You were never in any danger!” “Except from the wild animals.” His lids swept down as if he needed a reprieve from looking at her. “Alert me if you’re attacked by a rabbit.
The more I resist [Christ] and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call 'Myself' becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events wh...
Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter...
I knew there was something peculiar about you," she said. "And I mean that as the highest compliment." I'd always known I was strange. I never dreamed I was peculiar.
But more words tumble out. 'You're a painter. You're a baker. You like to sleep with the windows open. You never take sugar in your tea. And you always double-knot your shoelaces.' Then I dive into my tent before I do something stupid like cry.
What is it about hairdressers? You tell them 'not too short' and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as 'whack the shit out of it.' If you never say, 'not too short,' everything is fine. You say it, & it's a guarantee you'll come out read...
...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.
Dolorita Hunsickle says that the chipmunks tell your fortune if you catch them but I never did. She says a chipmunk told her she would grow up to be a famous ballerina and that she would die of consumption unloved in a boardinghouse in Prague.
That first shrink I saw when I got back to Clayton Falls told me no one is a lost cause, but I think that’s bullshit. I think people can be so crushed, so broken, that they’ll never be anything more than a fragment of a whole person.
You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.
Seamlessly?” Stella’s laugh escaped her mouth and it was bitter and hard. “That may be an appropriate statement, because in order to look seamless, you must need to have an entire world of shit going on under the surface. I don’t see this sea...
I am the Guillotine of Love, and I will never lose my head over another woman again.
Love means never having to say you’re sorry for a minor stab wound.