#books

Perhaps a book becomes a classic in proportion to how broadly its characters can be scavenged, how many readers find within it something they experience as desirable or even intimately necessary. ↗

— Janna Malamud Smith

#reading #experience

Despite the damaging effects of mounting criticism, we saw some lovely examples of the triumph of the human spirit. Al’s greatest trouble was accustoming his people to the concept that each had been given at least one gift of the Holy Spirit to be used for ministry in the community. It seemed to be foreign to them. For those who actually experimented with expressing what was locked inside there was delight and fulfillment. ↗

— David R. Mains

#christian-ministry #christian-sermons #experience

A religion is not contained in a single book; there's something religious in almost any book. ↗

— John A. Buehrens

#religion #faith

The story was so thoroughly believed that a Springfield, Massachusetts, missionary society resolved to send missionaries to the moon to convert and civilize the bat-men, apparently unaware that bat-men have lost all faith since they saw their parents gunned down in that alleyway. ↗

— Cracked.com

#humor #faith

Holy books are an insult to a God with good intentions. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #faith #god #holy-books #literature

Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words. ↗

— Donalyn Miller

#reading #sharing-books #love

Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can't, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room. ↗

— Elizabeth McCracken

#family

Books are the best type of influence of the past...Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#age

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#books #friends #greedy #life #loneliness

Art, he said, was a controlled madness...He said that books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes. ↗

— Steven Millhauser

#art