#separation

She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred. ↗

— Charles Frazier

#love #separation #war #age

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe. ↗

— Edmund Burke

#in my opinion #justice #liberty #made #neither

I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don't think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths. ↗

— Jimmy Carter

#between #built #christian #christianity #expense

I believed what my father taught me about the separation of church and state, so when I was President I never invited Billy Graham to have services in the White House because I didn't think that was appropriate. He was injured a little bit, until I explained it to him. ↗

— Jimmy Carter

#appropriate #because #believed #billy #billy graham

I've spent the last year and a half going through a very public separation, hiding in hotel lobbies. ↗

— Phil Collins

#half #hiding #hotel #i #last

It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#christianity #jerry-falwell #jesse-jackson #pluralism #religion

I started in 1946 in radio. I was ten years old. I was discovered singing in a school play. Someone was in the audience and it's six degrees of separation. ↗

— Hector Elizondo

#degrees #discovered #i #old #play

I believe in the separation of church and state, absolutely. But I don't believe in the separation of public life from our values, our basic values, and for many of us, our religious values. ↗

— Jim Wallis

#basic #believe #church #i #i believe

For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation. ↗

— Simone Weil

#beings #each #far #friends #meeting

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link. ↗

— Simone Weil

#cells #communicate #communication #each #every