GOD IS BEAUTY

'God is Beauty, who made all the beauties that pierce our hearts, from the burning autumn moon in rags of black cloud to the laughter of the woman you love. He does not want you to reject beauty. The beauties God has made can remind your intellect of, and prepare your heart to encounter, their Creator. He is beauty's climax and crescendo.'

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.169.

WOMEN SEE MORE

'"Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what's coming before a man even gets a sniff of it."'

Claire Keegan, Foster, p.66.

SHAME IS SOMETHING WE CAN DO WITHOUT

'"Where there's a secret," she says, "there's shame - and shame is something we can do without."'

Claire Keegan, Foster, p.21.

THE HUMILITY THAT CAN COME THROUGH BEING GAY

'For many high achieving, self-controlled, virtuous and dutiful homosexuals, the gay thing is the first thing that made them admit that they couldn't order their lives through willpower alone.'

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.113.

A BENEFIT TO BEING GAY

'Though I believe it is sinful to be queer, it has at least saved me from becoming a pillar of the Establishment.'

WH Auden in Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.110.

SINGLENESS & SOVEREIGNTY

'I want to suggest that our cultural attachment to ideas of "choice" can make it harder for us to see how God is working in the unchosen circumstances of our lives. When Christians argue that the only good celibacy is "voluntary" celibacy rather than mandated celibacy, they gloss over the degree to which all our choices are constrained by the interaction of circumstances and conviction.'

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.48.

LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOUR

'To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, to really see somebody, you have to love somebody.'

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary, p.39.

ART STOPS US IN OUR TRACKS

'...art is saying Stop. It helps us stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.'

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary, p.23.