I have a taste for a kind of melancholy and for being an absolute victim of love.
If you’re a church person and not a Jesus person, my heart hurts for you. It’s like being engaged and never getting married. It’s miserable.
I have always deeply desired to be an honest man who said it when I struggled, stumbled and worried. I longed to be a man with real friends - friends who knew me at my worst and loved me.
Grace-driven effort wants to get to the bottom of behavior, not just manage behavior. If you're simply managing behavior but not removing the roots of that behavior, then the weeds simply sprout up in another place.
Preach the Gospel with your life.
More often than not, we want him to have fairy wings and spread fairy dust and shine like a precious little star, dispensing nothing but good times on everyone, like some kind of hybrid of Tinker Bell and Aladdin’s Genie. But the God of the Bible, this God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is a pillar of fire and a column of smoke.
Men of God are those who walk in the fear of the Lord.
We must dissent from the fear.
A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was to create a book that affords readers some of the novel's long-form pleasures but that also contains the short story's ability to capture what is so difficult about being human - the brevity of our moments, their cruel irrevocability.
. . . people of old deemed freedom from greed precious, and this is how they got beyond the world.
Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.