Happy Birthday Grandpa In Heaven Quotes

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of. ~ Walter Kirn

I'm an old man, now. I've been alone since my 17th birthday. I'd wanted to marry, have a bunch of kids, and maybe be a grandpa. The big family around the Thanksgiving table, laughing and pouring wine and cracking jokes and harmlessly teasing the missus - I wanted that. I wanted to do something good with my life - something right. I didn't want what happened to Danny, my best childhood friend, to be the only mark I'd ever make in this world. But I thought it best not to fancy such hopes and dreams: a family, love. I'd been cursed by my best friend, and I thought it right not to inflict that curse on anyone who'd be foolish enough to love me. ~ J. Tonzelli

Later, at the sink in our van, Mama rinsed the blue stain and the odd spiders, caterpillars, and stems from the bucket.
"Not what we usually start with, but we can go again tomorrow. And this will set up nicely in about six, eight jars."
The berries were beginning to simmer in the big pot on the back burner. Mama pushed her dark wooden spoon into the foaming berries and cicrcled the wall of the pot slowly.
I leaned my hot arms on the table and said, "Iphy better not go tomorrow. She got tired today." I was smelling the berries and Mamaa's sweat, and watching the flex of the blue veins behind her knees.
"Does them good. The twins always loved picking berries, even more than eating them. Though Elly likes her jam."
"Elly doesn't like anything anymore."
The knees stiffened and I looked up. The spoon was motionless. Mama stared at the pot.
"Mama, Elly isn't there anymore. Iphy's changed. Everything's changed. This whole berry business, cooking big meals that nobody comes for, birthday cakes for Arty. It's dumb, Mama. Stop pretending. There isn't any family anymore, Mama."
Then she cracked me with the big spoon. It smacked wet and hard across my ear, and the purple-black juice spayed across the table. She started at me, terrified, her mouth and eyes gaping with fear. I stared gaping at her. I broke and ran.
I went to the generator truck and climbed up to sit by Grandpa. That's the only time Mama ever hit me and I knew I deserve ~ Katherine Dunn

I do have the ability to explore life and to be over the moon at the smallest thing - a few pints and a craic in the pub and I'm in heaven. But I have a melancholy side to me as well. Acting allows me to feel things, it kind of buys me human experience. And I don't mean this as acting as higher cause, because it's not, but it does kind of have a higher awareness emotionally. ~ Colin Farrell

Oh! how should all hearts be taken with this Christ? Christians! turn your eyes upon the Lord: 'Look, and look again unto Jesus.' Why stand ye gazing on the toys of this world, when such a Christ is offered to you in the gospel? Can the world die for you? Can the world reconcile you to the Father? Can the world advance you to the kingdom of heaven? As Christ is all in all, so let him be the full and complete subject of our desire, and hope, and faith, and love, and joy; let him be in your thoughts the first in the morning, and the last at night. ~ Isaac Ambrose

We are pure LIGHT and pure LOVE. Spiritual beings journeying in physical form. We are divinity at the same time we are walking the earth. Children of the ONE. We are magnificent, beautiful and enlightened. We don't even have to look for it, its already within US. This is heaven on earth. As above so below. ~ Angie Karan

The wealthy, Jesus says, can only get into heaven through the eye of a needle; the same applies to churches wealthy in numbers and programs. ~ Mark Galli

Be generous to the poor orphans and those in need. The man to whom our Lord has been liberal ought not to be stingy. We shall one day find in Heaven as much rest and joy as we ourselves have dispensed in this life. ~ Saint Ignatius

How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven. ~ William S. Burroughs

It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning re-election to their golden thrones in heaven year after year. ~ Aravind Adiga

Some men's wit is like a dark lantern, which serves their own turn and guides them their own way, but is never known (according to the Scripture phrase) either to shine forth before men, or to glorify their Father in heaven. ~ Alexander Pope

There is no God, and man is his prophet," replied Niels bitterly and rather sadly.
"Exactly," scoffed Hjerrild. "After all, atheism is unspeakably tame. Its end and aim is nothing but a disillusioned humanity. The belief in a God who rules everything and judges everything is humanity's last great illusion, and when that is gone, what then? Then you are wiser; but richer, happier? I can't see it."
"But don't you see," exclaimed Niels Lyhne, "that on the day when men are free to exult and say: 'There is no God!' on that day a new heaven and a new earth will be created as if by magic. Then and not till then will heaven be a free infinite space instead of a spying, threatening eye. Then the earth will be ours and we the earth's, when the dim world of bliss or damnation beyond has burst like a bubble. The earth will be our true mother country, the home of our hearts, where we dwell, not as strangers and wayfarers a short time, but all our time. Think what intensity it will give to life, when everything must be concentrated within it and nothing left for a hereafter. The immense stream of love that is now rising up to the God of men's faith will bend to earth again and flow lovingly among all those beautiful human virtues with which we have endowed and embellished the godhead in order to make it worthy of our love. Goodness, justice, wisdom--who can name them all? Don't you see what nobility it will give men when they are free to live their life and die their death, witho ~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems. ~ Carl Safina

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again. ~ Frederick Buechner

I imagined the Augustus Waters analysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing physical basketballs? Who makes the basketballs in question? Are there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a celestial basketball factory so that I can play? Or did an omnipotent God create the basketballs out of the vacuum of space? Is this heaven in some kind of unobservable universe where the laws of physics don't apply, and if so, why in the hell would I be playing basketball when I could be flying or reading or looking at beautiful people or something else I actually enjoy? It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than either the person I was or whatever I am now. ~ John Green

Think about the comfortable feeling you have as you open your front door. That's but a hint of what we'll feel some day on arriving at the place our Father has lovingly and personally prepared for us in heaven. We will finally - and permanently - be 'at home' in a way that defies description. ~ Charles Stanley

We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low. ~ Desmond Tutu

May today be a happy memory, tomorrow a bright new promise. Happy Birthday ~ Rob Jackson

It comes out from no source, it goes back in through no aperture. It has reality yet no place where it resides; it has duration yet no beginning or end. Something emerges, though through no aperture - this refers to the fact that it has reality. It has reality yet there is no place where it resides - this refers to the dimension of space. It has duration but no beginning or end - this refers to the dimension of time. There is life, there is death, there is a coming out, there is a going back in - yet in the coming out and going back its form is never seen. This is called the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing. Being cannot create being out of being; inevitably it must come forth from nonbeing. Nonbeing is absolute nonbeing, and it is here that the sage hides himself. ~ Zhuangzi

My home is in Heaven. I'm just traveling through this world. ~ Billy Graham

Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don't be afraid. I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers - your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and damned rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off. ~ James Baldwin

Heaven is weary of the luxury of China. I shall remain in the wilderness of the north. I shall return to simplicity and moderations once again. As for the clothes I wear and the food I eat, I shall have the same as cowherds and grooms and I shall treat my soldiers as brothers. In a hundred battles I have been at the forefront and within seven years I have performed a great work, for in six directions of space all things are subject to one ruler. ~ Genghis Khan

Sunday Morning

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inh ~ Wallace Stevens

According to Life & Style Weekly, 50 Cent may be working on Lindsay Lohan's next album. Finally, a match made in rap heaven. He's a convicted drug dealer who's been shot nine times, and she spent 84 minutes in prison. This is a big step for Lindsay. The last time Lindsay got near a black guy she ran over his foot. ~ Chelsea Handler

For many miles on either side of the river's oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

But since those Romans were in an earthly city, and had before them, as the end of all the offices undertaken in its behalf, its safety, and a kingdom, not in heaven, but in earth - not in the sphere of eternal life, but in the sphere of demise and succession, where the dead are succeeded by the dying - what else but glory should they love, by which they wished even after death to live in the mouths of their admirers? ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Happy Birthday, Dad!" exclaimed Dennis and John excitedly. "I don't like birthdays," said Dad. ~ David Walliams

Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning-bolt. ~ Mary Renault

But many a crime deemed innocent on earth Is registered in Heaven; and these no doubt Have each their record, with a curse annex'd. ~ William Cowper

Every one of these old people... were as shriveled as prunes, and as bony as skeletons, and throughout the day... they lay huddled in their... bed... dozing the time away with nothing to do. But as soon as they heard the door opening, and heard Charlie's voice saying, "Good evening, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine, and Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina," then all four of them would suddenly sit up, and their old wrinkled faces would light up with smiles of pleasure-and the talking would begin. For they loved this little boy. He was the only bright thing in their lives, and his evening visits were something that they looked forward to all day long. Often, Charlie's mother and father would come in as well, and stand by the door, listening to the stories that the old people told; and thus, for perhaps half an hour every night, this room would become a happy place, and the whole family would forget that it was hungry and poor. ~ Roald Dahl

He led a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God's thunderbolts ... hurled into hell, he was unbeaten. A third of God's angels he had led with him, and straightaway he incited man to rebel against God, and gained for himself and hell a major portion of all the generations of man. Why was he beaten out of heaven? Because he was less brave than God? less proud? less aspiring? No! A thousand times no! God was more powerful, as he said, Whom thunder had made greater. But Lucifer was a free spirit. To serve was to suffocate. He preferred suffering in freedom to all the happiness of comfortable servility. He did not care to serve God. He cared to serve nothing. He was no figurehead. He stood on his own legs. He was an individual. ~ Jack London

Sometimes ... we grow homesick for heaven. Many times in the midst of the sin, suffering, and sorrow of this life there is a tug at our soul. That is homesickness coupled with anticipation. ~ Billy Graham

Established religion is like established anything else. It's easy. It offers answers you can get prepackaged and predigested, right off the shelf, and the same for everybody. No thinking required, much less hard thinking. Like a board game
you follow the rules, you go to heaven. That's why established religion gets the assholes. They aren't "good" Christians. I rather doubt they ever gave up a thing they valued for any reason or anybody. People like that aren't good anything. What they believe, they believe because it's appropriate; it's what everybody believes because it's the right thing to do
in short, it's easy. Our way isn't easy. We get assholes too, but they usually give up and get out, or get it knocked out of them. ~ Mercedes Lackey

In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June
Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers
they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night. ~ Jack Kerouac

Let's love everyone without judging them, then we will find the heaven in earth. ~ Debasish Mridha

A worship service finds its impetus from an inner furnace of love that burns in the hearts of God's people and is fueled from the altar in heaven. ~ Anonymous

In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel. ~ Teresa Of Avila

In understandably wishing to increase freedom and liberty, it paradoxically left massive road kill everywhere on the highway to rational heaven. ~ Ken Wilber

There is no light in earth or heaven but the cold light of stars; and the first watch of night is given to the red planet Mars. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If one is seeking for Heaven on earth, has slept in geography class. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God. ~ John Green

One of the most remarkable of these hymns is that addressed to the Unknown God. The poet says: "In the beginning there arose the Golden Child. As soon as he was born he alone was the lord of all that is. He established the earth and this heaven." The hymn consists of ten stanzas, in which the Deity is celebrated as the maker of the snowy mountains, the sea and the distant river, who made fast the awful heaven, He who alone is God above all gods, before whom heaven and earth stand trembling in their mind. Each stanza concludes with the refrain, "Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice?" We have in this hymn a most sublime conception of the Supreme Being, and while there are many Vedic hymns whose tone is pantheistic and seems to imply that the wild forces of nature are Gods who rule the world, this hymn to the Unknown God is as purely monotheistic as a psalm of David, and shows a spirit of religious awe as profound as any we find in the Hebrew Scriptures. ~ Epiphanius Wilson

Jesus, our head, is already in heaven; and if the head be above water, the body cannot drown. ~ John Flavel