A VERY SAD ENDING

'As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop.'

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop, p.156.

THE DANGER OF THINKING YOU UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY

'Understanding makes the mind lazy.'

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop, p.101.

CHILDHOOD

'At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done.'

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop, p.76.

THE SELF-SACRIFICE OF KINDNESS

'She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.' 

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop, p.1. 

EVANGELISM VS. SOCIAL ACTION

'Whether in a story from a Jericho ditch, or in a letter from a Birmingham jail, we must be reminded that we serve a God of both justice and justification, and we must not pit the two against each other.'

Russell Moore, Onward, p.111. 

CHRISTIANITY & CULTURE

'When the church honors and cares for the vulnerable among us, we are not showing charity. We are simply recognizing the way the world really works, at least in the long run. The child with Downs syndrome on the fifth row from the back in your church, he's not a "ministry project." He's a future king of the universe. The immigrant woman who scrubs toilets every day on hands and knees, and can barely speak enough English to sing along with your praise choruses, she's not a problem to be solved. She's a future queen of the cosmos, a joint-heir with Christ.

The most important cultural witness the church has it not to raiser up Christian filmmakers and novelists and artists and business leaders and politicians, although we ought to work to disciple those in all sorts of callings, and encourage them. The most important cultural task we have is to crucify our incipient Darwinism, in which the leaders on the inside of the kingdom colony are the same as they would be on the outside, even if there were no God in the universe. The first step to cultural influence is not to contextualize the present, but to contextualize to the future, and the future is awfully strange, even to us.' 

Russell Moore, Onward, p.82. 

THIS CREATION WILL LAST

'The creation then is not temporary, because God has joined the "dust of the earth" in human nature to his own nature, in the person of Jesus.' 

Russell Moore, Onward, p.60. 

CATACOMBS & CATHEDRALS

'...we Christians sometimes forget the paradoxical grace of God in giving us a legacy of both cathedrals and catacombs. The catacombs, of course, are the legacy of a tiny, persecuted band of believers, meeting in their underground graveyards, to escape the all-seeing eye of imperial Rome. The cathedrals represent a very different turn, a church that not only grew in size but, in fact, outgrew and outlasted the Empire itself. The catacombs represent simplicity and earthiness; the cathedrals transcendence and wonder. We need them both.' 

Russell Moore, Onward, p.33. 

THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP

'The best advice...for resisting lust is not to get an Internet filter (although you should do that too!), but to have good friends. If we have genuine friendships in which we learn to give and receive love in a healthy and satisfying way, we will be less inclined to wander off looking for sham substitutes and quick fixes.' 

Rebecca Konydyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices, p.178. 

RELATIONSHIPS

'Now, though, as an almost forty-eight-year-old, he saw people's relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person. Now he looked at couples - in restaurants, on the street, at parties - and wondered: Why  are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What's missing in you that you want someone else to provide? He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.' 

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, p.568.