Charles Martin Quotes

I think when two people really love each other ... way down deep ... like where the souls sleep and dreams happen, where pain can't live 'cause there's nothing for it to feed on ... then a wedding is a bleeding together of those two souls. Like two rivers running together. All that water becoming the same water. Mine did that.

I'm no expert, but I know one thing about anger - it's like alcohol. At some point, if you pour enough in there, it's coming back up. You may think you've built up a tolerance, but the truth is this - no man, not even Unc, can bury it so deep that it doesn't erupt at some point like Vesuvius and splatter your soul across the earth.

When you laugh ... I want to smile. And when you cry ... ' She brushed the tears off of my face. 'I want the tears to roll down my cheeks.' She shook her head once, whispering, 'I'm not leaving you ... won't.

This side of the grave, no one--and I don't care who they are or what sin or sins they have or are committing--is too far gone.

I'm one half of a two-piece puzzle.

From out of your heart, you speak.
-Emma, When Crickets Cry

Many times in our lives, we act like He's still dead. But several times today, we've testified that He's not. So which is it? Why say one thing with your mouth and yet live another with your life? If He's alive, act like it. He either is or He isn't. You can't be half-alive.

He traced a line in the dirt with his toe. 'This is a battlefield. Has been since Cain killed Abel. And don't let it get complicated. Gray it ain't. It's black and white. Good versus evil. You might as well choose sides right now.

You rescued me when I thought nobody would. When I thought I wasn't worth the effort. You gave me everything and asked for nothing.'
She pressed her face to mine.
'If this is love on the other side of the rescue, then I want to live it. With you. But,'
She shook her head.
'But if you give you to me, then'-
she placed her palm flat across my chest
-'come heavy

We're all broken, all walk with a limp. Here is the truth about you and me: even when in a far-off country, wasted life, stripped bare, smeared, squandered, nothing but scar tissue and shameful, self-inflicted wounds, the love of the Father finds the son and daughter.

I have come to kno one thing without ay shadow of doubt: if anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart

It's amazing what we value when we're at our lowest.

Forgive your enemies ... it messes with their heads.

My life had been characterized by emptiness the size of the Sahara but there, in that moment, in the back of that truck in the armpit of Nicaragua, I wondered - for the first time - if there wasn't a river flowing down deep inside me. If so, the water that would cleanse me was not water from my head - where I'd learned to rationalize my indifference. But water from my heart.

(Water) ... no matter how wide or deep you cut it ... it has no memory. No scar ... it's all future, no past.

Sometimes the most courageous thing a man can do is run back across the battlefield and rescue the wounded.

Football is not played with strong arms and fast feet, it's played with heart. Grow your heart and your arms and feet will follow ... You play long enough and you might find yourself in a place where your arms and feet fail you ... That's when you find out what's in your heart.

O where will you go when the blinding flash
Scatters the seed of a million suns?
And what will you do in the rain of ash?

I'll draw the blinds and pull down the sash,
And hide from the sight of so many noons.
But how will it be when the blinding flash

Disturbs your body's close-knit mesh
Bringing to light your lovely bones?
What will you wear in the rain of ash?

I will go bare without my flesh,
My vertebrae will click like stones.
Ah. But where will you dance when the blinding flash

Settles the city in a holy hush?
I will dance alone among the ruins.
Ah. And what will you say to the rain of ash?

I will be charming. My subtle speech
Will weave close turns and counter-turns-
No. What will you say to the rain of ash?
Nothing, after the blinding flash

- Terminal Colloquy

Never make it without the compass. In the trees, I'd lose all sense of perspective. Direction. Maybe life is like that.

More than that, I liked being known, and for the first time in my life, I was known by another. I'm not saying I liked what she knew about me, not proud of the bits and pieces, but somehow she was standing inside my skin and yet I didn't experience shame at her reflection.

You take the bad with the good, Rise up through it. Live in the mist of it. It's the bad that lets you know ho good the good really is. Don't let the bad leave you thinking like there ain't any good. There is, and lots of it, too.

She cried easily. Evidence that she felt much, and most often for other people. A rare and beauty filled gift.

Forgiveness offered -especially when so undeserved - cuts chains off the human heart that no other power in any universe anywhere can rattle much less break ... love did what hatred can not and never will.

As strange as it sounds, broken people are fixed by other broken people. It's God's economy.

Ashley tried to speak. Tried again and still could not find the words. Finally she wiped her eyes, pressed her ear to my chest, and whispered. 'Give me all the pieces.

What do you want in a woman, in life?'
I thought a moment ... 'The Rangers ... we began to describe one another in a few simple words: El es muy bueno para cabalgar el rio. Meaning, 'He'll do to ride the river with.' In Texan, it means, 'I'd trust him with my life.'
I scratched my head. 'I want someone to ride the river with.

If the worst is a possibility, then you keep it on the table. Don't hide from it. Don't run. It can happen. And if and when it does, you need to have thought about it ahead of time. That way you're not crushed when your worst thought becomes your reality.

A lot of dead writers feed my mind with their ever-present whisperings.

The river never changes. it may alter it's path a bit, but it never changes. It's us who change. We come back here and we're are different. Not it."
Form can't be extracted from the essence like some broth reduction."
This river's taught me a good bit. Probably why I don't leave here. It winds, weaves, snakes around. Rarely goes the same twice. But, in the end, it always ends up in the same place and the gift is never the same." ... "it's the journey that matters.

You put a new heart in Emma a long time ago, it just wasn't the kind you were thinking of." He laughed to himself. "Hope is an amazing thing. I saw it in Emma, saw it with my own eyes.

All hearts have but one request. One simple, unspoken, undeniable need. One undeniable fear.
To be known.

If your knuckles are bloodier than your knees,then you're fighting the wrong battle.

In my previous life, I learned something. I remember seeing it painted on the faces of the kids in the hospital. It is this: All hearts have but one request. One simple, unspoken, undeniable need. One undeniable fear.
To be known.
You can stamp it out. Kill it. Box it up and hem it in. Numb it and close the door. Bury it and nail it shut. Encase it in stone. But eventually, the needs of the heart will tear the door off the hinges, unearth it, and crack the stone. No prison ever built could house it. Those of us who think we can are lying to ourselves. And those next to us.
Hope never dies.

Back home, I went to my closet and pulled out the old engineer's transit case stored there. When we were kids, Emma and I had found it in the attic, dusty and empty, and the leather strap used to carry it had a small cut in it. The tag on the top of the wooden-hinged lid read Circa 1907. It was mostly weatherproof and offered plenty of room for the things I valued - like books.

Indifference is the curse of this age. Indifference is evil, and it couldn't be farther from the heart of God.
Afterword - On Digging a Well p. 359

Child, you listen to me, and you look me straight in the eyes when I'm talking to you. I may be just old hired help, and a country woman to boot, but I'm a human. And you know what? God thought of me. He actually took the time to dream me up. I may not be much to look at, but what you see first started in the mind of God, so don't stand there and ignore me like I don't exist. You remember that. Miss

The amazing thing about transplantation, aside from the fact that it worked, was that it allowed people to feel again. The thing I liked best about my previous life was the first smile when a patient woke up. Because with that smile, I knew that I hadn't simply given that persona new pump, I had given him or her a new pump that allowed that person to live, to express emotion. It was the smile, even more than the first beat of the heart, that told me it had worked.

Remember, there's an inverse relationship between your head and your heart. If your head swells, your heart shrinks. Tucker,

She smiled, tilted her head, and ... have you ever seen video of melting glaciers where huge chunks, the size of skyscrapers, break off and crash into the sea? If hearts could do that, then when her hair slid from behind her ear and down her eyes, and the right side of her lip turned up, I heard my heart crack down the middle.

You know sometimes when I walk into your room with a flashlight or a candle?' I nodded. 'Well, love is like that. Light doesn't have to announce it's way into a room or ask the darkness to leave. It just is. It walks ahead of you, and the darkness rolls back like a tide.' She waved her hand across the room. 'It has to 'cause darkness can't be where light is.

You can put your boots in the oven, but that doesn't make them biscuits. - You can say whatever you want about something, but that doesn't change what it is.

Augustine said it best: You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

Scientists say that these things evolved this way over millions of years." He shook his head. "That's a bunch of bunk. I don't think an animal can just all-of-a-sudden decide it wants to make light grow out it's butt. What kind of nonsense is that? Animals don't make light." He pointed to the stars. "God does that. I don't know why or how, but I'm pretty sure it's not chance. It's not some haphazard thing he does in his spare time."
He looked at me, and his expression changed from one of wonder to seriousness, to absolute convicton. "Chase, I don't believe in chance." He held up the jar. "This is not chance, neither are the stars." ... "And neither are you. So, if your mind is telling you that God slipped up and might have made one giant mistake when it comes to you, you remember the firefly's butt.

I know I'm not alone and I don't walk alone. That I won't. When the thin whisper of a veil between what I can't see and what I can is pulled back and for one brief second I get a glimpse of what will be. Where the words 'might' and 'hope' intersect.

Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes. This ... is goodbye. But not out last hello.

I guess sometimes it's got to hurt before it can get better."
I nodded. "Hearts are like that.

The books talked about it [the heart] as if it were a sump pump stuck down in the muck and mire of somebody's backyard. Never in all my scientific reading did I encounter anything that talked about a broken heart. Never did I read anything about what the heart felt, how it felt or why it felt. Feeling and knowing weren't important, only understanding

The problem with a wish list was what it told you about the person who wrote it. If it's honest, it's a rock-bottom, barebones, clear shot all the way to someone's soul.
Hats can do the same thing.

It's complicated." "Yeah? Welcome to Earth. Everything here is complicated.

Hope is not the result of medicine or anything that science has to offer. It is a flower that sprouts and grows when others pour water upon it. I think sometimes that I spent so much time worrying about how to protect and strengthen the flower - even going so far as to graft in a new stem and root system - that I forgot to simply water it.

He picked up one of Lorna's roses and set it in my lap. "Here." I picked it up and smelled it. He poked me in the shoulder. "See what I mean? Thorns don't stop you from sniffing. Or putting them in a vase on the kitchen table. You work around them ... Cause the rose is worth it ... Think what you'd miss.

He thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow.

Do you do that with all your friends?"
"What's that?"
"Prepare them for the worst."
She nodded. "If the worst is a possibility, then you keep it on the table. Don't hide from it. Don't run. It can happen. And if and when it does, you need to have thought about it ahead of time. That way you're not crushed when your worst thought becomes reality.

But what I knew in my head stayed up there, swirling about the other ten zillion things I had retained. That knowledge informed my actions, what I did and how I did it.
What Emma knew filtered from her head down into her heart and informed who she was - what I have since come to call the Infinite Migration. If my wonderings about life were scientific, bent toward examination and physical discovery, Emma's all leaned toward matters of the heart. While I could understand and explain the physics behind a rainbow, Emma saw the colors. When it came to life, I saw each piece and how they all fit together, and Emma saw the image on the face of the puzzle. And every now and then, she'd walk me through the door into her world and show it to me.

(Mutt, a mentally ill brother who is setting fire to a load of expensive things from the house he grew up in and was physically abused and neglected in)
"Tuck (mutt's brother is being asked), aren't you going to stop him?"
'Why?'
'Well' - she waved her hand across the house - 'couldn't you two do something good with all this?" ...
"Yeah, but the money we earned wouldn't buy as much therapy as that fire ...

... Broken people just need piecing back together.
For so long I'd carried the pieces of me. Every now and then I'd drop one like a breadcrumb. So I could find my way home. Then Ashley came along and gathered the pieces and somewhere between 11,000 fee and sea level, the picture began taking shape. Dim at first, then clearer. Not yet clear. But these things take time.
Maybe each of us was once a complete whole. A clear picture. A single piece. Then something happened to crack and shatter us. Leaving us disconnected, torn and splintered. Some of us lie in a hundred pieces. Some ten thousand. Some are edged with sharp contrast. Some dim shades of gray. Some find they are missing pieces. Some find they have too many. In any case, we are left shaking our heads. It can't be done.
Then someone comes along who mends a tattered edge, or returns a lost piece. The process is tedious, painful, and there are no shortcuts. Anything that promises to be one is not.
But somehow, as we walk from the crash site - away from he wreckage - whole sections start taking shape, something vague we see out of the corner of our eye. For a second, we stop shaking our heads. We wonder. Maybe...just maybe.
It's risky for both of us. You must hope in an image you can't see, and I must trust you with me.
That's the piecing.

Child, the Lord gives you what you need, when you need it.

...somewhere in that intersection of broken hearts and shattered souls... broken is not the end of things, but the beginning. Maybe broken is what happens before you become unbroken. What's more, maybe our broken pieces don't fit us... maybe my pieces are the very pieces needed to mend you and your pieces are the very pieces needed to mend me, but until we've been broken we don't have the pieces to mend each other. Maybe in the offering we discover the meaning, and value of being broken. Maybe...somewhere on the planet is another somebody standing around holding a bag of all the jagged, painful pieces of themselves and they can't get whole without you... Maybe love, the real kind, the kind only wished for in whispers and the kind our hearts are hardwired to want, is opening up the bag of you... And what's more, they don't cost you anything. They're free. I paid for them in the breaking... And because you're desperate, and you've tried most everything else, you empty my bag across the floor... and...find the one piece you've been missing... And when you insert that piece into the puzzle that had become you, it stops the hemorrhage, and for the first time in maybe your whole life, the wound starts to heal.

Once a heart breaks ... it doesn't just grow back. It's not a lizard's tail. It's more like a huge stained glass that shattered into a million pieces, and it's not going back together. Least not the way it was. You can mush it all into one piece, but that doesn't make it a window. That makes it a pile of broken colored glass. Shattered hearts don't mend and they don't heal. They just don't work that way.

the mountain between us is one i cannot climb .

I'm not leaving you. Not going it alone. Not looking at the memory of you everytime I close my eyes.

Love has its own communication. It's the language of the heart, while it has never been transcribed, has no alphabet, and can't be heard or spoken by voice, it is used by every human on the planet. It is written on our souls, scripted by the finger of God, and we can hear, understand, and speak it with perfection long before we open our eyes for the first time.

And they ate supper before they said grace ... Oh, um ... she moved into his house, stayed awhile, and then they got married.

Marry the man who's going to walk with you through the next fifty or sixty years. Open doors, hold your hand, make your coffee, rub lotion on the cracks of your feet, put you up on a pedestal where you belong. Is he marrying your face and your bottle-blond hair, or will he love you when you look like whoever you're going to look like in fifty years?

The only monster you need to worry about in this life is the one that stares at you from the mirror each morning. You tame him, make friends with him, and the rest of life is nothing you can't handle.

If my life were still a movie, this is the part that would end up on the cutting room floor. We were all just fill-ins for a long-running soap opera. The actors changed, but the story seldom did. Certainly not the action.

If you're having trouble making a distinction between the voices in your head, let me put it this way: there are two sources of supernatural power on this earth. Jesus and satan. If what you're hearing does not come from Jesus, then by definition, it does come from satan.

No matter how screwed up the artist might be, there's still the chance that they can produce art that people like us hang on our wall and talk about long after their death. That the sum is greater than one part. That maybe one incident does not a life make.

Here's the truth: No matter what happened on the stage tonight, no matter where you went when you drove out of here, no matter where you end up, no matter what happens, what you become, what you gain, what you lose, whether you succeed or fail, stand or fall, no matter what you dip your hands into...no gone is too far gone.

You can always come home.

And when you do, you'll find me standing right here, arms wide, eyes searching for your return.

I love you.

Never judge someone by their relatives.

If God can make a firefly's butt light up like a star, then anything is possible. Anything.

That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. At the time

A song is a light we shine on others, not a light we shine on us.

Hatred and anger does not kill hatred and anger.

People marvel at the genius of Mozart because he supposedly wrote "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" at the age of three and composed his first symphony at the age of twelve. And yes, of course he was a genius, but another way to look at it is that he just discovered early what it was God made him to do. That's all. For some reason, God gave him a little extra, or a little something different, and Mozart found out what that was and then got a head start on using it. Of course he was brilliant, but that's not the point. The point is he knew, and then he got to work.

Love is a choice. It's a decision.' She told us, 'It flows into, through, and out of each person like a river. If you try to stop it, it'll sneak around until It finds another heart and breaks through.

There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.

Tucker, I want to tell you a secret." She curled my hand into a fist and showed it to me. "Life is a battle, but you can't fight it with your fists." She gently tapped me on the chin with my fist and then put her hand on my chest, " You got to figt it with your heart.

The library was magical because every time I walked through the door, there were literally thousands of voices ready and willing to have a conversation with me. I walked through the door, stared at all those stacks and bindings, and whispered, Tell me a story.

Since that moment, I'd bought into the idea that isolation would ease my pain and indifference was the remedy for rejection. Clarity was quick in coming. Isolation is a prison and indifference is a lie. Neither work.