Elementally Quotes

Without his shirt she could see just how bony he was, probably twenty or thirty pounds under his fighting weight from his years in captivity. He loomed over her, and she finally understood her ambivalence. He had protected her, killed for her, led her to safety. He was safety.
But he was also big and raw and so elementally male that it made her teeth sweat. She'd spent most of her life blissfully above the calls of the flesh and the dark, desperate couplings that subsumed others. She didn't like sex, didn't want sex. Body parts were simply that. She looked at MacGowan and thought about sex. ~ Anne Stuart

People of faith can read the Bible so that almost any perspective on a current issue will find some support in the Bible. That rich and multivoiced offering in the Bible is what makes appeals to it so tempting - and yet so tricky and hazardous, because much of our reading of the Bible turns out to be an echo of what we thought anyway. THE ISSUE OF LAND The dispute between Palestinians and Israelis is elementally about land and secondarily about security and human rights. ~ Walter Brueggemann

There's something elementally horrific about waking before dawn. ~ David Foster Wallace

I had always believed that the very best food contains something elementally repugnant. That its innate grotesquerie is what makes it so perversely alluring. My own favorite foods tended toward a certain sludgy, muddy texture. And from the most expensive and genteel through to the indulgently crass, the appeal of slop abides: caviar, escargots, foie gras or hamburgers, kebabs, macaroni and cheese. Even vegetable soup forms a membrane. Apples begin rotting from the very first bite. No matter which end of the spectrum, there lies fundamentally and yet delectably disgusting, some squirmy, sinewy, oozing, greasy, sticky, glutinous, mushy, fatty, chewy, viscous thing that compels. The line between pleasure and revulsion can seem so very thin, if it even exists at all. ~ Lara Williams

One compelling alternative to land theology is the recognition that Judaism consists most elementally in interpretation of and obedience to the Torah in its requirements of justice and holiness. ~ Walter Brueggemann

The world is on fire, I thought wildly. See it burn and oh, my God, it burns for us. ~ T.J. Klune

For Judaism, God is not a Kantian idea but an elementally present spiritual reality - neither something conceived by pure reason nor something postulated by practical reason, but emanating from the immediacy of existence as such, which religious man steadfastly confronts and nonreligious man evades. ~ Martin Buber