T. S. Monk Quotes
He, who thought it necessary to maintain himself in her good graces, strove to console her under her disappointment by committing a little violence upon truth.
Too many people are missing their destiny a year at a time because they're too scared to think in decades!" (p. 127)
It’s better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.
...he felt God the same way arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only a hint of him.
I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.
My mother was a good Catholic -- she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary's in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.
A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument
...Mary, fresh with feminist appropriations, has the potential to undergird women’s reformations.
The stranglehold of the departed was much resented by the new generation of aspiring authors. Which is why it is who did make the breakthrough were so admired.
It is often the parishioners, the men and women in the pews, who set the tone.
Because there was no pre-existing patrician elite, those successful in the new book industry could write very swiftly to the top of the social hierarchy.
Print, it transpired, was not just an instrument of agitation and change: now it was equally necessary to win the peace.
Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint.
She forgot: it was as simple as that. She just loved being with the guy. Possibly enough that not even their own wedding could screw it up.
Guilt, did I say? In what consists ours, unless in the opinion of an ill-judging world?
There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meter out in these precious sips. I would well up from Hugh's heart in spoonfuls, and he would feed it to me. And it would be enough.
There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.
And then there is the most dangerous risk of all -- the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else--first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.
I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.
Apparently loved did weird things to a girl's practical decision-making skills - Matilda
I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.
His plain, undecorated, and utilitarian work reeked week of provincialism.
Maybe one reason I had avoided anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible.
Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?
They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
In real life, love and hate are often only separable if we’re willing to recognize our demons and choose to become better people.
In an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity.
I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.
Perhaps I lost sight of my dreams when I became an adult and resigned myself to acting the way adults were supposed to act.
Ambrosio was yet to learn, that to an heart unacquainted with her, Vice is ever most dangerous when lurking behind the Mask of Virtue.
Don't be telling me--can't be done. That's some god damney white talk, that's what that is.
Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting alone was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.
I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to.
It occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what's divine can come in dark skin.
You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.
To condemn slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but female ministers!
You're looking for a reason, " she said. "And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present.
The basic dynamics of conversion are summed up for me in the words LEAVE-ARRIVE, END-BEGIN, SHED-EMERGE. These are the tensions of conversion and spiritual awakening.
I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any.
Change is hard at first, Messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.
we grow fearless when we do the things we fear