• “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.”

-- Terrence Malick, Tree of Life

• "When we form our own beliefs independent of those around us, we set out to sea. The waters of the future are unclear. As the ship sets sail, there is no way to know if the new life you are living will be successful. The new life may not work out, but it will be more authentic then following the ideas and practices of those around you simply because they have already been established."

-God as a Spider: The Religious and Existential Implications of Bergman and Nietzsche on Christian Fsith by Sean Volk

• "And what I recollect of the Monday, that fine fall day, is that for some long moments in the boat, I was suddenly aware of my state, in a way we often aren't. That is, I was abruptly and most intensely, sharply aware of all the aspects of life surrounding me, and yet of feeling neither part of it nor truly separated from it. Somehow impartial, unattached-an observer. Yet sentient of it all. Deeply sentient, in fact. But to no apparent purpose."

-When I was Gone by Sue Miller (pg4)

• "If they had to die let it be fast. You might even provide a heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves."

-The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

• “Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”

— Albert Camus

• "I looked at the countryside, at the long lines of cypresses sloping up toward the skyline and the hills, the hot red soil dappled with vivid green, and here and there a lonely house sharply outlined against the light—and I could understand Mother’s feelings. Evenings in these parts must be a sort of mournful solace."

-The Stranger by Albert Camus (pg11)

• "She was born and then she was eighteen and still she was looking in wonderment at the veins of leaves that matched the veins in her neck. Staring into a mirror she looked and looked and did not find anything but a constellation of freckles and two eyes like oil wells. Black, reflecting rainbows and an unrelenting trap for those who let themselves fall in. "

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• “You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”

-Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle."

-Vladimir Nabokov

• "There was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do- determined to save the only life you could save."

-Mary Oliver

• "I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night."

-Khaled Hosseini

• “Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”

― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

• There are people we meet in life who miss being important to us by inches, days, or heartbeats. Another place or time or a different emotional frame of mind and we would willingly fall into their arms; gladly take up their challenge or invitation. But as it is, we encounter them when we are discontent or content and they are not. Whatever they are, we are not and vice versa. Two trains going in different directions that pass for a few powerful moments at full speed, blasting noise and wind but then they are gone. Whatever serious chemistry might have been possible if, isn’t.

- Jonathan Carrol

• "5. It is harder to be funny than to be serious. For instance, this is a serious sentence: 'After dinner, Alistair roamed the formal garden behind this unfamiliar house, wishing he had never betrayed Lorelei's trust.' That took me eight seconds to write. And yet I've been trying to write a funny sentence for three hours now, and I'm getting hungry.
• It is easy to say something to people who are exactly like you. A bigger challenge lies in locating that universal piece of all of us that wants to be wowed, and brought together by a great story. There isn't a human in the world who wouldn't enter the Sistine Chapel and not want to look up. Does that make Michelangelo a low-brow populist?"

- Matt Haig

• "To Grace, for spending this juncture between the past and the future with me."

- Carl Zimmer, She has her Mother's Laugh

• “They say they will love, comfort, honour each other to the end of their days. They say they will cherish each other and be faithful to each other always. They say they will do these things not just when they feel like it, but even - for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health - when they don't feel like it at all. In other words, the vows they make at a marriage could hardly be more extravagant. They give away their freedom. They take on themselves each other's burdens. They bind their lives together in ways that are even more painful to unbind emotionally, humanly, than they are to unbind legally. The question is, what do they get in return?

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ They get each other in return. Assuming they have any success at all in keeping their rash, quixotic promises, they never have to face the world quite alone again. There will always be the other to talk to, to listen to. If they're lucky, even after the first passion passes, they still have a kindness and a patience to depend on, a chance to be patient and kind. There is still someone to get through the night with, to wake into the new day beside. If they have children, they can give them, as well as each other, roots and wings. If they don't have children, they each become the other's child. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ They both still have their lives apart as well as a life together. They both still have their separate ways to find. But a marriage made in heaven is one where they become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could ever have managed to become alone. When Jesus changed the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, perhaps it was a way of saying more or less the same thing.” ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ — Frederick Buechner