"zippers, when they first appeared, had been denounced from pulpits as lures of the Devil because they made clothes so easy to take off" Margaret Atwood

"You called, You cried, You shattered my deafness. You sparkled, You blazed, You drove away my blindness. You shed Your fragrance, and I drew in my breath and I pant for You. I tasted and now I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and now I burn with longing for Your peace." Augustine

"Sometimes our most holy calling is to listen, to bear witness." Sarah Bessey

"There is something so satisfying about watching an ugly lie burn away to ash." Sarah Bessey

"The childlike quality isn't unthinking acquiescence: it's curiosity. But here is the key... the true wonder of childlike faith: They truly want to know." Sarah Bessey

"The Bible wasn't meant to fulfill my expectations any more than it was meant to receive my worship." Sarah Bessey

"we're not called to be peacekeepers but peacemakers." Sarah Bessey

"Blessed are the wonderers with the courage to live into the questions. Seems to me that sooner or later, whether we like the outcome or not, theirs is the answer." Sarah Bessey

"We can prophesy a better world with our very words and actions." Sarah Bessey

"I believe in the undivided life. There aren't spiritual things and sacred things, not really." Sarah Bessey

"the slippery slope may very well be your saving grace, sending you careening into truth and love, newness and beauty." Sarah Bessey

"May we be the ones who don't give up on radical inclusion." Sarah Bessey

"the extravagant pleasures of simply being by myself." Kate Bolick

"the only place this horrific jealousy exists is inside of you. If you stop feeling it, it will disappear." Kate Bolick

"I was most alive when alone, negotiating odd encounters on the subway, surging along the sidewalk with a million faceless others. It was an expansive sensation, evasive, addictive. Each morning I rushed from the apartment to find it, as if late for an appointment." Kate Bolick

"Nobody would mistake me for cool. Just that month a classmate had turned to me and said, 'Were you actually born yesterday? Is it possible for an adult human being to get as excited about things as you do?'" Kate Bolick

"persons who are wedded to good old points of view, most respectable people in fact, hate the effort of adjusting themselves to uncertain new ones." Kate Bolick

"she suspected that her innate introversion and desire for stability and order would eclipse and distort her fierce autonomy--that, left alone, she actually would, in a sense, become a 'dotty spinster,' insofar as that means turning away from the world instead of sating her curiosities by living in it" Kate Bolick

"Her heart, she jokes, belongs to her tea, that 'accomplice of spinsterhood.'" Kate Bolick

"Running like a current beneath all those allegedly sexless nineteenth-century marriages (if not actually propping them up) had been an intensity and freedom of expression around same-sex friendship that we postmoderns can hardly begin to imagine. Men held hands or linked arms as they walked down the street; soldiers embraced one another to give comfort or solace. Adolescent girls cultivated passionate attachments that served as trial runs for the "real" relationship they'd someday have with a husband, writing love letters sodden with endearments, snuggling and sleeping in the same bed, often engaging in heavy petting, a practice regarded as so harmless that people rarely thought to mention it, leaving historians to puzzle out who was technically a lesbian and who wasn't" Kate Bolick

"This... is what it means to be alone: this spectacularly acute aliveness to every colour and scent and sound, the knowing that there is nothing between you and the vibrant, pulsating universe except this coat, these boots--which, you just as instantly realize, are exactly all you need." Kate Bolick

"Didn't she remember that being single is more than just following your whims--that it also means having nobody to help you make difficult decisions, or comfort you at the end of a bad week?" Kate Bolick

"Every life, even in America, goes without a certain range of personal joy of some variety or another." Kate Bolick

"Are women people yet? By which I mean: Are we finally ready for a young woman to set out on the long road of her life as a human being who inhabits but isn't limited by her gender?...Until the answer is an undeniable yes, a girl actually can't grow up like a boy, free to consider the long scope of her life as her own distinct self." Kate Bolick

"We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue our petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires." Russell Brand

"We must all constantly die and be born again, moment to moment, to live forever in the now" Russell Brand

"The only time Jesus ever let himself go and knocked over tables was when the financial industry were prioritized over normal people." Russell Brand

"From a balanced reading of the Ten Commandments, we can only assume that God would prefer you to have gay sex than to covet your neighbour's oxen." Russell Brand

"There is no doubt that I as much as anyone have to change." Russell Brand

"A tradition is just an old idea, only of value if it remains relevant. To remain relevant it must resonate with timeless principles, principles of unity and fairness." Russell Brand

"Do you want those boots if the true cost is God?" Russell Brand

"Death grip... is the literal translation of the word 'mortgage.'" Russell Brand

"When people say, 'The system works,' they mean, 'The system works for me.'" Russell Brand

"Resentment is painful to carry, justified resentment no less so." Russell Brand

"The people that are in poverty, pain, prison, those that are suffering--I feel like they carry the burden for us all, like troops on a foreign front to ensure our freedom." Russell Brand

"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen

"The more I read, listened, and thought, the more the Bible came together in new and compelling ways." Peter Enns

"That's Jesus for you. Making people across time upset with him." Peter Enns

"Jesus, like other Jews of the first century, read his Bible creatively, seeking deeper meaning that transcended or simply bypassed the boundaries of the words of scripture." Peter Enns

"knowing God is also a form of not knowing God, of knowing that we cannot fully know, but only catch God in part" Peter Enns

"the word of God as a two-edged sword is supposed to be turned inward, piercing us, not everything around us." Peter Enns

"maybe diversity tells us something about what God is like." Peter Enns

"Christian, don't expect more from the Bible than you would of Jesus... If you saw Jesus walking down the street back then, you wouldn't notice anything all that special--no glow around his head or lightning bolts shooting out of his eye. And, like the rest of us, he had periods of suffering and then eventually died. That is how Christians believe God showed up--in-fleshed in humility, in culture, in human story, a peasant who fit right into the day-to-day world of the first century and then suffered the humiliation of execution... we shouldn't expect anything else from the Bible." Peter Enns

"Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit and oratory." Rachel Held Evans

"I have come to regard with suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven't actually read it." Rachel Held Evans

"That a woman who managed to be both a virgin and a mother is often presented as God's standard for womanhood can be frustrating for those of us who have to work within the constraints of physical law." Rachel Held Evans

"We cling to the letter because the spirit is so much harder to master." Rachel Held Evans

"that Christ sent women out as the first witnesses of the complete gospel story, is perhaps the boldest, most overt affirmation of their equality in his kingdom that Jesus ever delivered. And yet too many Easter services begin with a man standing before a congregation of Christians and shouting, "He is risen!" to a chorused response of "He is risen indeed!" Were we to honor the symbolic details of the text, that distinction would always belong to a woman." Rachel Held Evans

"We have to be better in order to receive the same level of respect as the men." Rachel Held Evans

"If a man ever tries to use the Bible as a weapon against you to keep you from speaking the truth, just throw on a head covering and tell him you're prophesying instead." Rachel Held Evans

"I will speak out against those who try to silence women with patriarchal readings of Scripture that idolize the culture and context in which the Bible was written over the equality and freedom granted to each of us in Christ." Rachel Held Evans

"Too many of us have succumbed to the idea that 'leaders' are a specific type of people or that "leadership" is a character quality to be obtained... Leadership isn't a goal. Leadership is a role. Wisdom and strength is what we should pursue. Not leadership. Wisdom is discerning when to lead. Strength comes from practicing wisdom. Leadership is a role that changes hands depending on context." Rachel Held Evans

"It's a 'half-changed world'" Cordelia Fine

"the peculiar loneliness of not being asked to do something you'd never want to do in the first place." Vivi Greene

"it's not always the case that only one person is wrong." Katie Heaney

"We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright." Ernest Hemingway

"God tastes like fire." Hans Hut

"However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted." Aldous Huxley

"Christ promised to be present where two or three are gathered together. He did not say anything about being present where thousands are intoxicating one another with herd-poison." Aldous Huxley

"The indispensable is not necessarily the desirable. What is demonstrable good in the sphere of economics may be far from good for men and women as... human beings." Aldous Huxley

"The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to over-simplify complex issues. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth." Aldous Huxley

"It will take time. But it is the only hope. He will at least have made a start." Christopher Isherwood

"Christopher should have challenged him on this, but he didn't. He kept silent. Worse still, he felt himself blushing as though he were guilty. Which he was--of cowardice." Christopher Isherwood

"laughter was the only alternative to futile screaming hate." Christopher Isherwood

"I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it." Christopher Isherwood

"She was full of wit and gossip and delicately malicious laughter." Christopher Isherwood

"but if they claim that their system is juster... doesn't that make their injustice... less excusable and their hypocrisy even viler?" Christopher Isherwood

"It explains it, but it doesn't excuse it." David Levithan

"I offer my body as a torch to dissipate the dark to waken love among men to give peace to... the one who burns herself for peace..."I pray that the flame that is consuming my body will burn away all ambition and hatred which have been pushing many of us into the Hell of the soul and creating so much suffering among human beings. I pray that the human race will be able to inherit Buddha's Compassion, Jesus' love, and the legacy of man's humanness." Nhat Chi Mai

"I know that there are truths that have been hidden from us... Ones we each have to find with our own hearts, Truth is as free as the air and we all have the right to breathe as deeply of it as we wish. It cannot be held back in the palm of any one man." Mary E Pearson

"I don't rule out for others what I haven't experienced firsthand." Curtis Sittenfeld

"you've been a voice of reason amid a cacophony of foolishness." Curtis Sittenfeld

"I've never met anyone with your interest in other people. Even when you're judging them, you do it with such care and attention... I always know your reasons will be very specific and you'll express them with great passion." Curtis Sittenfeld

"Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being." Rebecca Solnit

"the unknown need not be turned into the known through false narratives; it's a celebration of darkness" Rebecca Solnit

"the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation." Rebecca Solnit

"even if we can't completely comprehend, we might care." Rebecca Solnit

"she then went on to a life of interpretation that, in its great moments... resisted the pigeonholes, the oversimplifications and easy conclusions." Rebecca Solnit

"We also have those blind spots later generations may or may not condemn us for." Rebecca Solnit

"What do they want-- a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?" Rebecca Solnit

"All desires are the inappropriate substitute for the desire to be at one with God." Radhanath Swami

"Dramatic change is perceived as a threat to the status quo, primarily because it is." Phyllis Tickle

"Jesus tastes like... whatever you desire." Lauren F Winner

"Perhaps, if I received Jesus as wine, I would know divine intoxication again. (Would that be bearable? Just as being drunk on a man seems to interfere with what I think I am supposed to do in a given day, or a given life, surely being intoxicated with Jesus would, too.)" Lauren F Winner

"Do I really want a God with a body? Would I prefer a God who lives as I try to live--mostly in my head?" Lauren F Winner

"I am reminded that there is no greater sign of God's orientation for us, God binding God's self to us, than the Incarnation, the taking on of vulnerable human flesh." Lauren F Winner

"The God who is fire wants to hold our gaze--and indeed, our bodies--as a lover does." Lauren F Winner

"The point is not that our language is limited; the point... is that God is "too much." God's utter difference from the world is too much to describe, and God's nearest intimacy with the world is too near to name. We cannot really say that nearness; we can only gesture toward it and surround the gesture with the knowledge that what we have said is inadequate; and then sometimes stop altogether, and put away all the gestures and all the description and all the speech." Lauren F Winner

"You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent... But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be." Virginia Woolf

"Blood of Christ, Make me drunk." from the Anima Christi