John Mark Green Quotes

With rough hands and gentle heart, I'll seduce you. You will feel my power and surrender to desire. ~ John Mark Green

She had a very inconvenient heart. It always insisted on feeling things ever so deeply. ~ John Mark Green

Unsightly

If I strip my heart naked, you'll see all the unsightly scars, I'm afraid. ~ John Mark Green

Things began happening with odd synchronicity, as if the universe itself was conspiring on behalf of their love story. ~ John Mark Green

She thirsted for love, but found only a mirage. Some hearts are a desert you can die wandering in. ~ John Mark Green

Your heart plays a song like a broken music box, but nothing ever sounded quite so beautiful to me. Together, in the dance of wounded-wing swans we'll rise above the ruins, melting into the golden light. ~ John Mark Green

As you remove toxic people from your life, you free up space and emotional energy for positive, healthy relationships. ~ John Mark Green

Your life will consist of a series of times when you must reinvent yourself. We desperately cling to the idea that things should stay the same, but life and growth are about change. Don't mistake the end of a chapter for the end of the story. Lean into the plot changes, and follow your character arc. If you are in a dark part of your tale, know that this night will not last forever, but you must be brave enough to see it through. This is not the end, oh no my friend. Take courage. Better things await you. ~ John Mark Green

I'll be your blanket, baby. Wrap yourself up in me. Let me give you shelter, in the winter of this world. ~ John Mark Green

With skin dressed only in moonlight, she beckons you to her secret garden. ~ John Mark Green

I'm an introvert.
If your party isn't better
than the one in my head,
I'm not interested. ~ John Mark Green

Exquisite beauty
is often hidden
in life's fragile,
fleeting moments. ~ John Mark Green

Who was it that hurt you,
stole light out of your eyes?
Cut a hole in your heart
and let the love drain dry?
Who was so damn careless,
to leave you with such scars?
Where will you find healing?
Right here, within my arms. ~ John Mark Green

Do you dare journey into the wild places of your heart? ~ John Mark Green

Looking back at our lives, the unbelievable thing is that despite all the times when things felt so wrong, we still managed to meet at the perfect moment. Almost as if by some plan
which we were unaware of. ~ John Mark Green

Even when your heart is blue, I'll safely hold it. I really don't mind these indigo-stained hands. ~ John Mark Green

I walk these lonely streets at dark. Just me and the night; crowded head, empty heart. ~ John Mark Green

Life tried to crush her, but only succeeded in creating a diamond. ~ John Mark Green

After what she's been through, there really should be crime scene tape around her heart. ~ John Mark Green

You rang my heart like a church bell at midnight. Trembling, I awoke to the sweet sound of love. ~ John Mark Green

Opening to love will always involve risk,but a heart safe from pain is one also locked to joy. ~ John Mark Green

Sadness is a bruise on the skin of memory. ~ John Mark Green

She is a wild, tangled forest with temples and treasures concealed within. ~ John Mark Green

Hope is a flower which refuses to be crushed under life's brutal heel. ~ John Mark Green

You make me feel at home in my own skin, and that is one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me. ~ John Mark Green

Rebellious leaves
going out
in a blaze of glory,
setting trees aflame
in riotous color.
Reluctant surrender
to rumors
of coming winter. ~ John Mark Green

I'm a pusher dealing hope, at the intersection of Desire and Despair. ~ John Mark Green

The Ache That Would Not Leave

Behind the hum and routine of daily living, there lay a persistent and wild longing for something she could not easily put into words. It felt like impulsive adventures and watching the sun rise over unfamiliar mountains, or coffee in a street café, set to the background music of a foreign language. It was the smell of the ocean, with dizzying seagulls whirling in a cobalt sky; exotic foods and strange faces, in a city where no one knew her name. She wanted secrets whispered at midnight, and road trips without a map, but most of all, she ached for someone who desired to explore the mysteries that lay sleeping within her. The truly heartbreaking part was that she could feel the remaining days of her life falling away, like leaves from an autumn tree, but still this mysterious person who held the key to unlock her secrets did not arrive; they were missing, and she knew not where to find them. ~ John Mark Green

Her veins flowed with liquid poetry. I stole the words from her mouth with my kisses. ~ John Mark Green

She was a tragic beauty. Sadness had left its fingerprints all over her face. ~ John Mark Green

Be a pain transformer,
not a pain transmitter.
This is the only way
the world will heal. ~ John Mark Green

Your heart was
a wishing well.
Bottomless.
Trying to love you
bankrupted me. ~ John Mark Green

Out of the void and vastness of the cosmos, life emerges; audacious, improbable. You and I are here. No other miracle is needed. ~ John Mark Green

Rusted Flowers

From her heart's
tear-salted soil,
rusted flowers grew.
A serrated beauty;
wounding all those
who bent near. ~ John Mark Green

I kiss your tear-stained cheeks, tasting the saltiness of a hidden sea of sorrow. ~ John Mark Green

I want to kiss you so thoroughly that you lose your ability to stand. ~ John Mark Green

Beautiful are those whose brokenness gives birth to transformation and wisdom. ~ John Mark Green

Sometimes poetry is a way of finding beauty in the chaos; a flower growing in ruins of love's wreckage. ~ John Mark Green

We are snowflakes, melting
on the tongue of the universe. ~ John Mark Green

In a relationship, no amount of extra effort on your part can make up for a lack of effort on theirs. ~ John Mark Green

I do not claim that love will be easy,
only that it is worth it. Choose love. Always. ~ John Mark Green

Please thaw my permafrost heart. ~ John Mark Green

I blinked my eyes
and in an instant,
decades had passed. ~ John Mark Green

You are not the darkness you endured.
You are the light that refused to surrender. ~ John Mark Green

We're all in the human race. The question is, are you running toward your dreams or just away from your fears? ~ John Mark Green

People at war with themselves will always cause collateral damage in the lives of those around them. ~ John Mark Green

You'll never have control over other people's decisions, or what cards life deals you. Your power lies in the choosing of your response. That is the one thing you can control. ~ John Mark Green

A Quiet Death

Biting your tongue so words don't slip out. The taste of copper, sharp in your mouth. 'Penny for your thoughts' the saying goes, but they could never afford the words buried below. Sentenced to silence, laid unmarked graves, as you're slowly murdered by the things you don't say. ~ John Mark Green

Birthing is never easy or without pain, be it a universe, a child, or a fresh start in life. Contraction precedes expansion. Darkness comes before dawn. Joy follows pain. This is the way of things. ~ John Mark Green

Beneath the rust and grime which dulls the shine of our weathered hearts, joy patiently waits to be rediscovered ~ John Mark Green

One by one she slew her fears, and then planted a flower garden over their graves. ~ John Mark Green

Each of us is a story, waiting for a devoted reader who will take us off the shelf and embrace all our plot twists. ~ John Mark Green

Continents drift, and so do hearts. ~ John Mark Green

Let's just sit quietly and listen to the secrets the rain wants to tell us. ~ John Mark Green

The way our fingers intertwine feels so natural and right; as if our hands hold memories of meeting in a thousand other lifetimes. ~ John Mark Green

No matter how dark your night, my friend, may you always find enough light to take the next step. ~ John Mark Green

In the time of to Augustine, the conversation in the West mostly had been a Christian reaction to outside ideas. After Augustine, the Great Conversation would be about his ideas for centuries. ~ John Mark Reynolds

When King Mark heard of the death of these two lovers, he crossed the sea and came into Brittany; and he had two coffins hewn, for Tristan and Iseult, one of chalcedony for Iseult, and one of beryl for Tristan. And he took their beloved bodies away with him upon his ship to Tintagel, and by a chantry to the left and right of the apse he had their tombs built round. But in one night there sprang from the tomb of Tristan a green leafy briar, strong in branches and in the scent of its flowers. It climbed the chantry and fell to root again by Iseult's tomb. Thrice did the peasants cut it down, but thrice it grew again as flowered and as strong. They told the marvel to King Mark, and he forbade them to cut the briar any more. ~ Joseph Bedier

Mark my words. Someday, somehow, he WILL be back. And upon his return, shake the very foundation of heaven and hell. Irrevocably. Irredeemably. Because that's one bad-ass motherfuckin' bird! ~ John Layman

The mark of a successful organization isn't whether or not it has problems, its whether it has the same problems it had last year. ~ John Foster Dulles

My Name
Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go. ~ Mark Strand

The prodigy who fades is an old story. But the prodigy who sets a high mark when young and then hits that mark, or exceeds it, over and over again, for a full lifespan, is truly remarkable, and worth celebrating. ~ John Baird

You may have your diploma from a seminary, ordained by a Bishop, or commissioned by a denomination but ONLY God can "mark" a man. ~ John Paul Warren

So St Matthew, St Mark, St Luke, and St John, penned their Gospels for the use of the Church, the one supplying often what another omits, but yet none pretending to give an exhaustive or perfect account of all that Jesus Christ said and did, for if this had been attempted, St John tells us, "the whole world would not have contained the books that would be written" about it. ~ Henry Grey Graham

The major mark of justified believers is joy, especially joy in God himself. We should be the most positive people in the world. For the new community of Jesus Christ is characterized not by a self-centered triumphalism but by a God-centered worship. ~ John Stott

The Gospel of John tells us that the Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of glorious grace and truth, was also the Word through whom all things- all phenomena in nature, all capacities for fruitful interaction, all the kinds of beauty- were made. To honor that Word as he deserves to be honored,evangelicals must know both Christ and what he has made. ~ Mark A. Noll

A few of us who are around the sixty mark don't play that much these days and if you are taking on a couple of guys in their forties it is very difficult. ~ John Newcombe

The United States had a long bipartisan tradition of negotiating with even its worst enemies, from John Kennedy
'Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate
to Richard Nixon's opening with China, to Ronald Reagan's famous 'walk in the woods' with MIkhail Gorbachev. Obama's position was firmly in line with longstanding diplomatic practice. George W. Bush's post-9/11 policy
'You are either for us or against us'
was the exception, and a bad one. It removed subtlety from international affairs. ~ Mark Bowden

I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently. ~ Lucas Neff

We were set up to love. To absorb the love of God into our bloodstream and then to share it with another human being. ~ John Mark Comer

As when the dove returning bore the mark Of earth restored to the long labouring ark; The relics of mankind, secure at rest, Oped every window to receive the guest, And the fair bearer of the message bless'd. ~ John Dryden

Mark this on your wall and remember it always: The greatest single most powerful enemy to success is success itself. ~ John Patrick Hickey

She found Mark curled up at the foot of her bed, reading a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. He was wearing a pair of cotton pajamas that Emma had bought for three dollars from a vendor on the side of the PCH. He was partial to them as being oddly close in their loose, light material to the sort of trousers he'd worn in Faerie. If it bothered him that they also had a pattern of green shamrocks embroided with the words GET LUCKY on them, he didn't show it. ~ Cassandra Clare

Now more than ever I am aware that a person's significant birthdays can either mark the passage of time, or they can mark changes they've made in their lives to reach their potential and become the person they were created to be. With each passing year, I want to make good choices that make me a better person, help me become a better leader, and make a positive impact on others. ~ John C. Maxwell

I just noticed I've been writing lots of female-led things. Two of them haven't been announced yet, but the big Greg Capullo book I'm doing is a female-led story, and I'm doing another series with John Romita which is a female-led story as well. ~ Mark Millar

Erasmus's Bible-saturated mind. His was a mind too broad for fundamentalism, which rejects reason, and too honest for intellectualism, which rejects revelation. ~ John Mark Reynolds

Let me tell you the truth about the world to which you so desperately want to return. It is a place of pain and suffering and grief. When you left it, cities were being attacked. Women and children were being blasted to pieces or burned alive by bombs dropped from planes flown by men with wives and children of their own. People were being dragged from their homes and shot in the street. Your world is tearing itself apart, and the most amusing thing of all is that it was little better before the war started. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done.

And even if you avoid warfare and violent death, little boy, what else do you think life has in store for you? You have already seen what it is capable of doing. It took your mother from you, drained her of health and beauty, and then cast her aside like the withered, rotten husk of a fruit. It will take others from you too, mark me. Those whom you care about--lovers, children--will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them. Your health will fail you. You will become old and sick. Your limbs will ache, your eyesight will fade, and your skin will grow lined and aged. There will be pains deep within that no doctor will be able to cure. Dise ~ John Connolly

It's time to write dangerous music. It's time to take risks. It's time to wear your heart on your sleeve, and sing about the things that actually matter to you. It's time to bury the shackles of religious expectation and stop trying to put new clothes on the dead. ~ John Mark McMillan

John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of "antiwar," which he felt, and I'm paraphrasing him here, was like being "anti-food" or "anti-sex," since war was such an essential element of human experience. ~ Mark Bowden

A recently deceased American Zen master and navy veteran, John Daido Loori, used to say that those who think Buddhism is just about stillness end up sitting very silently up to their necks in their own shit. ~ Mark Epstein

Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair. ~ George Eliot

Who was the first person to go to the tomb? Was it Mary Magdalene by herself (John)? or Mary along with another Mary (Matthew)? or Mary along with another Mary and Salome (Mark)? or Mary, Mary, Joanna, and a number of other women (Luke)? Was the stone already rolled away when they arrived at the tomb (Mark, Luke, and John), or explicitly not (Matthew)? Whom did they see there? An angel (Matthew), a man (Mark), or two men (Luke)? Did they immediately go and tell some of the disciples what they had seen (John), or not (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)? What did the person or people at the tomb tell the women to do? To tell the disciples that Jesus would meet them in Galilee (Matthew and Mark)? Or to remember what Jesus had told them earlier when he had been in Galilee (Luke)? Did the women then go tell the disciples what they were told to tell them (Matthew and Luke), or not (Mark)? Did the disciples see Jesus (Matthew, Luke, and John), or not (Mark)?1 Where did they see him? - only in Galilee (Matthew), or only in Jerusalem (Luke)? ~ Bart D. Ehrman

When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have to do. ~ John Scalzi

In the first gospel, Mark, the risen Christ appears physically to no one, but by the time we come to the last gospel, John, Thomas is invited to feel the nail prints in Christ's hands and feet and the spear wound in his side. ~ John Shelby Spong

For the sake of Christ, God has made peace with the pilgrim, Christian. Christian is justified and is forgiven of all his sins. Christian is stripped of his rags and is given a robe of righteousness, which represents the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. Christian is given a mark on his forehead that sets him apart from the world and marks him as a true child of God who will be preserved from divine judgment. Christian is given a scroll with a seal on it, which represents his temporal assurance of his new life and acceptance into the Celestial City.
4. ~ John Bunyan

The logic of the Bible says: Act according to God's "will of command," not according to his "will of decree." God's "will of decree" is whatever comes to pass. "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that" (James 4:15). God's "will of decree" ordained that his Son be betrayed (Luke 22:22), ridiculed (Isaiah 53:3), mocked (Luke 18:32), flogged (Matthew 20:19), forsaken (Matthew 26:31), pierced (John 19:37), and killed (Mark 9:31). But the Bible teaches us plainly that we should not betray, ridicule, mock, flog, forsake, pierce, or kill innocent people. That is God's "will of command." We do not look at the death of Jesus, clearly willed by God, and conclude that killing Jesus is good and that we should join the mockers. ~ John Piper

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that. ~ John Galsworthy

The story of the angel announcing what the church calls the immaculate conception, is not so much as mentioned in the books ascribed to Mark, and John; and is differently related in Matthew and Luke. The former says the angel, appeared to Joseph; the latter says, it was to Mary; but either Joseph or Mary was the worst evidence that could have been thought of; for it was others that should have testified for them, and not they for themselves. Were any girl that is now with child to say, and even to swear it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed? Certainly she would not. Why then are we to believe the same thing of another girl whom we never saw, told by nobody knows who, nor when, nor where? How strange and inconsistent is it, that the same circumstance that would weaken the belief even of a probable story, should be given as a motive for believing this one, that has upon the face of it every token of absolute impossibility and imposture. ~ Thomas Paine

When an archer misses the mark he turns and looks for the fault within himself. Failure to hit the bull's-eye is never the fault of the target. To improve your aim, improve yourself. ~ John C. Maxwell

Let me out, witch," growled Alice. She began to hum off key.
Griselda stepped away from the door.
"I can help the little wee babes," Alice sung sweetly. "Through the woods and into the dark. Where he whispers the words to make his mark. Little boy of green..." Alice chuckled. "...has gone to the wizard who is evil and mean. ~ Kathy Cyr

McQueen was daring, original, exciting. He shook up the establishment with his creativity and understood what it takes to be a great British ambassador for fashion. I admired him very much. He was a fashion revolutionary that, like me, made the journey from [Central] Saint Martins to Paris where he put his own unique mark on the industry. He will not be forgotten. ~ John Galliano

Tolerance is not a spiritual gift; it is the distinguishing mark of postmodernism; and sadly, it has permeated the very fiber of Christianity. Why is it that those who have no biblical convictions or theology to govern and direct their actions are tolerated and the standard or truth of God's Word rightly divided and applied is dismissed as extreme opinion or legalism? ~ John Stott

As John finished his speech, Zack couldn't help but wonder how a country that had been served by a brilliant and inclusive president for eight years now chose to elect a narcissistic, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic racist with no experience in government. ~ Mark M. Bello

I felt bad for lying to John, who was about as honest as Abe Lincoln on sodium Pentothal. ~ Mark Adams

The cans of bathroom cleaner they sold had faced the sun in their display pyramid for so long that their front labels had faded from lime green to pale lemon. The mouse-print instructions about not eating the stuff could no longer be read. "If swallowed - " each of the cans said, then there was just a wordless scorch mark as warning. At ~ Mary Karr

A mark was on him from the day's delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember. ~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Weirdly, D&D didn't encourage my leanings towards trying magic of my own at all. In fact, it frustrated them. Even the most pompous and ambitious historical magicians, from the Zaroastrian Magi through John Dee, Francis Barrett and Aleister Crowley, never claimed to be able to throw fireballs or lightning bolts like D&D wizards can. So D&D was never going to feed the fantasies of practising magic in the real world. That is all about gaining secret knowledge, a higher level of perception or inflicting misfortune or a boon on someone rather than causing a poisonous cloud of vapor to pour from your fingers (Cloudkill, deadly to creatures with less than 5 hit dice, for those who are interested). The game, as we played it, just doesn't support the occult idea of magic.

In fact, it might even be argued that, by giving such a powerful prop to my imagination, D&D stopped me from going deeper into the occult in real life. I certainly had all the qualifications - bullied power-hungry twerp with no discernable skill in conventional fields and no immediate hope of a girlfriend who wasn't mentally ill. It's amazing I'm not out sacrificing goats to this day. ~ Mark Barrowcliffe

Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space - none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple of minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that cases I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature - lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful. ~ Mark Twain

I got no support from USA Wrestling. I was competing against professional Russians that do nothing but wrestle for a living, and I was forced to take a job working for this lowlife loser, John du Pont, who I didn't want in my life. I just wanted the money. ~ Mark Schultz

But as some muskets so contrive it
As oft to miss the mark they drive at,
And though well aimed at dock or plover
Bear wide, and kick their owners over. ~ John Trumbull