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. 

THE POWER OF SILENCE

'Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people's need to fill it - as long as the person isn't you, the interviewer. Tow of fiction's greatest interviewers - George Simeon's Inspector Maigret and John le Carre's George Smiley - have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking, and let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks. Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for myself I have less class. When I'm waiting for the person I'm interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write "SU" (for Shut Up!") in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of "SUs" there.' 

Robert A Caro, Working, p.137. 

INSTITUTIONS

'An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson in Robert A Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, p.633. 

GRIEVING A HUSBAND

'Oh, she thought, oh, this is how it is, it is the small things; a bonfire in the evening; this is what makes it so hard to bear. For what she missed now was not passion or important deeds, significant words, but the routine of everyday life, eating and work and sleep and talk of this and that, and the sound of footsteps about the house, the smell of wet boots on the step. Nothing could replace all of this, nothing, though she might live forever. It was not vows and fleshly love and the bearing of children she wanted, it was much less, and so much more.' 

Susan Hill, In the Springtime of the Year, p.125. 

WE LOOK FOR THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD

'He was talking about gathering the flowers, in the woods and along the banks and hedgerows, and moss from besides the stream. On Easter Saturday evening, people took them up to the churchyard and spent hours, dressing the graves, making beautiful floral patterns on the turf, they worked until it was dark and even later, by lantern light, so that, on the following morning, all the dead should be decked out with fresh-growing blooms, a resurrection.' 

Susan Hill, In the Springtime of the Year, p.102. 

THE PROBLEM WITH FAMILY LIKENESS

'Vi loved her mother, but was too much like her not to get irritated after fifteen minutes.' 

Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices, p.104. 

THE BBC

'...a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from...'

Penelope Fitgerald, Human Voices, p.43. 

FINALLY WHOLE

'To affirm the resurrection of the dead is to confess that the God who made us will finally make us whole - spirit, soul and body (1 Thess. 5:23).' 

Richard B Hays, First Corinthians, p.279. 

PRAYER AS FELLOWSHIP

'Prayer is a divinely ordained means of living in fellowship with God and each other.' 
J Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament, p.123.