LIFE

'We live the given life, and not the planned.'
Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p.178.

MIDDLE-AGE

'One of the disconcerting aspects of middle age was the realization that most of the crises which happened to other people also ultimately happened to you.'

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners, p.44.

THERE ARE NO ORDINARY LIVES

'...now I understand that there are no ordinary lives - that every death is the end of a single event in time's history: an event so improbable it represents a miracle, and irreplaceable in every particular.'

Sarah Perry, Death of a Ordinary Man, p.6.

HUMAN WHOLENESS

'Men are whole not only insofar as they make common cause with each other, but also insofar as they make common cause with their native earth, which is to say with creation as a whole, which is to say with the creator.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.104.

THE REALISM OF CHRISTIANITY

'Christianity does not merely offer a new way of beholding our world, but an enhanced capacity to live within that world and cope with its uncertainty and complexity, as well as our own frailty and failings. It enables us to confront glib and shallow accounts of our situation, such as the superficial rationalism of the Enlightenment or the facile optimism of an ideology of 'positive thinking', which seeks to exorcise any recognition of the darker and more disturbing aspects of human nature or creation. Reality is complex and ambivalent; wisdom demands that we recognise this, rather than crudely forcing it to be uniformly simple and positive. Intellectual violence is unable to suppress this darker truth about our world, which Christianity has afformed and confronted, rather than implausibly denied.'

Alister McGrath, Through a Glass Darkly, p.207.

WE ARE MEANING SEEKING CREATURES

'We cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning seeking creatures. The western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are not not enough.'

Jeanette Winterson in Alister E McGrath, Through a Glass Darkly, p.165.

EVERY PERSON AN ARTIST

'Every person you meet is an artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.64.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STRUCTURE

'...the students talked loudly about wanting to be free to dance, to make love, to be themselves. So do I. So we left literature and talked about the body, and I kept asking questions: what is it in you which gives you freedom? Finally one of the young men, with great reluctance, pulled out the word: skeleton. It is our bones, our structure, which frees us to dance, to make love. Without our structure we would be an imprisoned, amorphous blob of flesh, incapable of response. The amoeba has a minimum of structure, but I doubt it has much fun.'

Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.123.

THE GOOD DIFFICULTY DOES

'I think difficulty is good for us, and I say that not just as an excuse for writing some of the books I've written, which I'm told are not always easy reading. I say it because difficulty is one of those things that, rather obviously, obliges us to take time. The more time we take, the more our discovery is likely to turn into habit and into inhabiting. The less time we take over something, the easier we find something to resolve, map and digest, the less value, the less significance it will have. It's a rather old chestnut: Platonic philosophers and early Christian theologians were saying millennia back that the more easily you thought you'd got to know something, the less you'd care about it. Difficulty imposes discipline: it imposes the willingness to believe tat there is more to work on. And by reminding us that getting to where we are has taken time, it can also be one of the things that reminds us that our current cultural perspective, temporal or geographical, is not the obvious one. Taking time, the awareness of the "more" that we have not yet absorbed, may be one of the things (may be, but doesn't need to be) making us that little bit more patient with the criticism, the challenge, the alternative view, of another world, another culture, another person. It may be one of those things that builds solidarity rather than division, something, in other words, that extends the cooperation that properly belongs to knowledge.' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.64. 

REAL INTIMACY

'The real business of being human, I would like to argue, has little to with sex. Sex is rightly listed alongside the pleasures of eating and drinking. The same pleasure centre of the brain is lit up. But it's not intimate. Intimacy is about a spiritual, not a physical closeness. 

Real intimacy is singularly unerotic. When my mother died, when my husband's parents died, when we listened to each other and held each other - that was intimate. Being with someone who is grieving and being allowed in, being trusted to that extent - that is true intimacy, in a way that showing off our new negligee is not.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.95. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF INHABITING A STORY

'To be without a story is to live without any type of script that might help us know who we are and what we're about. We flail and meander. We frantically try on roles and identities to see if they fit. To be character-ized by a story is to have a name, a backstory, a project - all of which serve as rails to run on, something stable and given that we count on. We can be known because there's someone to know.' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.163. 

THE IDENTITY QUESTION

'The crucial question is not, Who I am? but, Whose am I?'

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.310. 

HOW TO BE REMEMBERED

'The uncommitted person is the unremembered person. A person who does not commit to some loyalty outside the self leaves no deep mark on the world.' 

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.299. 

THE SECRET OF LIFE

'The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.' 

Henry Moore in David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.295. 

KNOW YOUR LIMITS

'Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him,'
Walker Percy in David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.98. 

OUR CONTRADICTORY DESIRES

'...at the heart of our human condition is an unwillingness to accept things as they really are. We long for lives of permanence in a world of constant change and we strive to achieve it. We long for change in a world of permanent repetition and we dream of how to interrupt it.'  

David Gibson, Destiny, p.32. 

THE MESSAGE OF ECCLESIASTES

'Ecclesiastes teaches us to live life backwards. It encourages us to take the one thing in the future that is certain - our death - and work backwards from that point into all the details and decisions and heartaches of our lives, and to think about them from the perspective of the end.' 

David Gibson, Destiny: Learning to live by preparing to die, p. xii. 

HUMAN LIMITATIONS

'..to be human is to be limited...'
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal, p.260. 

AMBITION

'"...he'll do like the rest of us. He'll do what he wants to, till the time comes for him to wonder whether it was worth doing...'"

Howard Spring, Fame is the Spur, p.469. 

WE EXIST TO RELATE

'What makes a creature a specific creature is the ordering of a life with other lives, never its individual being alone. A child not only is a child but is a child for the adult who cares for her; a young man not only is a young man in himself but is one for the sake of the older man who teaches him; an old woman not only is an old woman but is so in respect to the young she embraces and guides. The textures of generation, genealogy, and probation that marks human creatureliness is itself given as a comprehensive set of relationships who shape can be determined only across time. The point is not that human creaturehood is species driven, with each individual serving the survival of the race. Rather, creaturehood is constellation driven: it is all about the all about the landscape and its multiple objects as they exist together, encounter, engage, and crumble within the divinely figured order.' 

Ephraim Radner, A Time to Keep, p.154.