Love And Death Quotes

Love and Death? What has great music or poetry ever been about, but those twin forces that undo a man? ~ Douglas Wynne

But hey, at least we'll have this strange story to tell, love and death and blood and daddy-issues. And holy crap, I'm a psychiatrist's wet dream. ~ Kendare Blake

Love and death are very similar. They're the times in your life when you most want to believe in magic, when you yearn for some symbolic act or retrospective edit that can change the world you find yourself in. ~ Michael Marshall Smith

We cannot live to be together
Forever doomed to love and death,
The latter bringing us together
Claiming from life the final breath!
So we shall love in death forever,
Evicted as we are from life,
As long as living shall be never
Successful in the love-long strife! ~ Tatyana K. Varenko

For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

There are no footprints on the sea and no road-signs, not a single guard-stone or post, and no bends, only paths of light and dark from which to choose, the choice is always a difficult navigation and the storm's wingspan immeasurable as the depths and the horizon, but the sea holds you in its mighty hand your life is a sea-blue tale of love and death. ~ Ase-Marie Nesse

Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite. ~ Michel Foucault

A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie. ~ Nikita Dudani

I smile quietly. She is with me all the time. I feel stupid now, for not seeing it sooner. But hey, at least we'll have this strange story to tell, love and death and blood and daddy-issues. And holy crap, I am a psychiatrist's wet dream.- Cas Lowood, Anna Dressed in Blood ~ Kendare Blake

The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." - James Baldwin, "The Creative Process ~ James Baldwin

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world. ~ John Cheever

If love and death did not exist, tears would not exist as well! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending. ~ Caitlin Doughty

I have noticed a curious bifurcation in outcome in the way romances are written by women et written by men - Love Story, The Bridges of Madison County, every James Bond tale ever penned, even the film named above - end with the woman either lost or dead. And the man free to love, or at least to have sex, again. Romances (in the modern genre sense) written by women end with the couple alive, together, and in a committed and at least potentially fertile relationship, ready to turn to the work of their world. In other words, men's romances are about love and death; women's romances are about love and life. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

Religion provides the only story that is fundamentally consoling in the face of the worst possible experiences - the death of a parent, for instance. In fact, many religions take away the problem entirely, because their adherents ostensibly believe that they're going to be reunited with everyone they love, and death is an illusion. ~ Sam Harris

We have all the time in the world.' Love found a record. He laid it on the player. The music started again, scratchy from age, but so sweet and beautiful and deep.
Someday.
And there, in the darkness, Love and Death and the ones inside of them danced until the song was done.
And then, when all around them was silent and still, they disappeared. ~ Martha Brockenbrough

The more one loves, the heavier the meaning of death becomes, and the deeper the sense of loss. Love and death are not different things, they are the front and back of the same thing. ~ Otsuichi

We can all nod and smile and carry on our end of the conversation in an endless loop while our minds float somewhere outside our bodies. We are thinking about our kids, about finances and fiancees and soon-to-be ex wives, about the sex we're not having, the sex our soon-to-be ex wives are having, about loneliness and love and death and Dad, and this constant crowd is like a fog on a dark road; you just keep driving and watch it dissipate in your low beams. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Only those who have dared to let go can dare to re-enter. ~ Meister Eckhart

Indeed, analyst Robert Bak calls orgasm "the perfect promise between love and death," the means by which we repatriate separation of mother and child through the momentary extinction of the self. It is true that few of us consciously climb into a lover's bed in the hope of finding our mommy between the sheets. But the sexual loss of our separateness (which may scare people so badly they cannot have orgasm) brings us pleasure, in part, because it unconsciously repeats our first connection. ~ Judith Viorst

The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history
hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death. ~ George Eliot

[T]he two fundamental tragedies of human existence, frustrated love and death ~ Erwin Panofsky

Under various names, I have praised only you, rivers! You are milk and honey and love and death and dance. From a spring in hidden grottoes, seeping from mossy rocks, Where a goddess pours live water from a pitcher, At clear streams in the meadow, where rills murmur underground, Your race and my race begin, and amazement, and quick passage. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows, My friends forsake me like a memory lost; I am the self-consumer of my woes, They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost; And yet I am, and live with shadows tost. ~ John Clare

I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit: The bearings are overheating - a minute longer, and the metal is going to melt and start dripping and that'll be the end of everything. I need a quick splash of cold water, logic. I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist.
Well, of course, it's clear that you can't establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it's also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid "dissolving in the universe," if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that's exactly what death is - the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e., love and death ... ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Love and death are everything, Jenny. Danger is the best part of the game. I thought you knew that.
-Julian ~ L.J.Smith

Wary of being caught unawares, we planned our parenthood, committed to trial marriages with pre-nuptials, and pre-arranged our parents' funerals - convinced we could pre-feel the feelings that we have heard attend new life, true love, and death. ~ Thomas Lynch

Sir, your baseball career may be over. You need to find a new profession. Gatewood answered, I've heard that before. (He had always come back. He would prove them wrong again.) (From Love and Death at the Encierro) ~ Hal Graff

Bad horror stories concern themselves with six ways to kill a vampire, and graphic accounts of how the rats ate Billy's genitalia. Good horror stories are about larger things. About hope and despair. About love and hatred, lust and jealousy. About friendship and adolescence and sexuality and rage, loneliness and alienation and psychosis, courage and cowardice, the human mind and body and spirit under stress and in agony, the human heart in unending conflict with itself. Good horror stories make us look at our reflections in dark distorting mirrors, where we glimpse things that disturb us, things that we did not really want to look at. Horror looks into the shadows of the human soul, at the fears and rages that live within us all.
But darkness is meaningless without light, and horror is pointless without beauty. The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well. They have room in them for laughter as well as screams, for triumph and tenderness as well as tragedy. They concern themselves not simply with fear, but with life in all its infinite variety, with love and death and birth and hope and lust and transcendence, with the whole range of experiences and emotions that make up the human condition. Their characters are people, people who linger in our imagination, people like those around us, people who do not exist solely to be the objects of violent slaughter in chapter four. The best horror stori ~ George R.R. Martin

And that's the worst of it, the part no one ever tells you about."

"What part?" he said, his voice still clenched with grief.

"How it never stops. How the pain of missing people never stops. When you burn your finger in a fire, it hurts, but it only hurts one way because you know what caused the pain and why the pain is there, and you know that it will settle, in a bit. But heart pain has facets, Silas. A thousand different sides, sharp and hard; most of them you don't even know exist, even when you're looking straight at them. When someone leaves, or dies, or doesn't love you in return, well, you may think you know why your heart hurts. But wrapped in there are a hundred kinds of fear all tangled in a knot you can't untie. Nobody wants to be alone. We all fear being left alone, being left behind. I know such things exist. But you must learn to see death as something more than loss, more than absence, more than silence. You must learn to make mourning into memory. For once a person takes leave of his life, that life becomes so much more a part of ours. In death, they come to be in our keeping. The dead find their rest within us. Thus, in remembrance, we are never alone. But people forget the power of memory. So we fear death in the deepest place of our very being, because we don't know that memories make us immortal. We focus instead on being gone and the awful mystery behind absence. Love and death - and those two are very closely bound together - sca ~ Ari Berk

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death. ~ E. M. Forster

What Mr. Kaufman and his team are after is less a portrait of any one person than one of the ethos of a place. In the deliberate, simple staging ... in which eight radiantly clean-scrubbed performers embody 60 different people against a bare-bones set, 'Laramie' often brings to mind 'Our Town,' the beloved Thornton Wilder study of life, love and death in parochial New Hampshire. ~ Ben Brantley

Regarding love what can you say? It's not the quantity of your sexual relations that counts. It's the quality. On the other hand if the quantity drops below once every eight months, I would definitely look into it. ~ Woody Allen

I always believed 'The Fly' to be a classic opera story. It's a tale of love and death, true love surviving in the face of physical decay and ultimate sacrifice. ~ Howard Shore

Wink kissed deep. Deep as a dark, misty, forest path. One that lead to blood and love and death and monsters. ~ April Genevieve Tucholke

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ~ Jim Harrison

There is a cycle of love and death that shapes the lives of those who choose to travel in the company of animals. It is a cycle unlike any other. To those who have never lived through its turnings and walked its rocky path, our willingness to give our hearts with full knowledge that they will be broken seems incomprehensible. Only we know how small a price we pay for what we receive; our grief, no matter how powerful it may be, is an insufficient measure of the joy we have been given. ~ Suzanne Clothier

My house says to me, "Do not leave me, for here dwells your past."
And the road says to me, "Come and follow me, for I am your future."
And I say to both my house and the road, "I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going. Only love and death will change all things. ~ Kahlil Gibran

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death. ~ Anthony Marra

Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it's one of the best. ~ Woody Allen

Art wasn't war at all - it was beauty and love and death. Art was everything, and it was eternal. ~ Aric Davis

What is any of this to us? Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it. ~ Tanith Lee

There is a blood-red thunder all around you, a blinding light flashes from time to time, voices roar and cease, roar and cease, you are in the grip of an unknowable agony, it is in your shoulders, your arms, your hands, your breath, an intolerable labor- and, no, it is not at all like approaching an orgasm, an orgasm implying relief, even, sometimes, however desperately, implying the hope of love. Love and death are connected, but not in the place I was that day. ~ James Baldwin

No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us. ~ Adrienne Rich

What do you need the mythology? ... Rituals evoke it. Consider the position of judges in our society, which Campbell saw in mythological, not sociological, terms. If this position were just a role, the judge could wear a gray suit to court instead of the magisterial black robe. For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized. So must much of life today, Campbell said, from religion and war to love and death. ~ Joseph Campbell

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman? ~ Woody Allen

Love and death," my father said. "It's all love and death. ~ Sherman Alexie

When I think of ages past That have floated down the stream Of life and love and death, I feel how free it makes us To pass away. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

I think actors who know their job know that's how you do it. You don't show up and make people miserable. That poor grip who's standing there, he just wants to feed his family. He doesn't need to hear about your psychosis on life and love and death. ~ Charlize Theron

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death. ~ Roland Barthes

Sex, love and death are universal and timeless dramatic themes. ~ Julia Ormond

We all have ideas about love and death. We keep a close eye out for them our entire lives, seeking one and avoiding the other, knowing all the while that both are mostly beyond our control. It is a both scary and exciting predicament. In the end, it all depends on how you look at it. One thing is for sure; it is never quite what you expect. ~ Tonya Hurley

Only love and death, are capable of changing everything. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Face a man with death, let him come out shining, and you might call his bravery simple. Face a small town boy with fame, love, and death, all before legal drinking age, and you will call it anything but simple. ~ Jim Provenzano

Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among 'Romances and Fantasies'. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and death is expressive of late nineteenth-century susceptibilities. Not unnaturally in an early novel, Hardy draws freely on his own life. ~ Geoffrey Harvey

Why were love and death such close neighbors? ~ Cornelia Funke

I write of love and death. What other subjects are there? ~ Arthur Schnitzler

Strange combination, isn't it
gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world. ~ Otsuichi

The very thing keeping me alive is also killing me - love. No wonder the rose symbolizes both love and death. They should have a deal where if you buy a dozen roses you get a free headstone. ~ Jarod Kintz

I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well. ~ Henry Scott Holland

I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas ... Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It's about words. It's about a man dealing with life. Okay? ~ J.R. Moehringer

Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death. ~ Cynthia Ozick

On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare. ~ Scott Turow

I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry. ~ Billy Collins

only love and death change all things. ~ Kahlil Gibran

There was a dragon who had a long-standing obsession with a queen's breasts," she said, growing breathless. "The dragon knew the penalty to touch her would mean death, yet he revealed his secret desire to the king's chief doctor. This man promised he could arrange for the dragon to satisfy his desire, but it would cost him one thousand gold coins." She spread her soapy hands over his nipples, then down his arms. "Though he didn't have the money, the dragon readily agreed to the scheme."

Grace," Darius moaned, his erection straining against her stomach.

She hid her smile, loving that she had this much power over such a strong man. That she, Grace Carlyle, made him ache with longing. "The next day the physician made a batch of itching powder and poured some into the queen's bra… uh, you might call it a brassiere… while she bathed. After she dressed, she began itching and itching and itching. The physician was summoned to the Royal Chambers, and he informed the king and queen that only a special saliva, if applied for several hours, would cure this type of itch. And only a dragon possessed this special saliva." Out of breath, she paused.

Continue," Darius said. His arms wound around her so tightly she could barely breathe. His skin blazed hot against hers, hotter than even the steamy water.

Are you sure?"

Continue." Taut lines bracketed his mouth.

Well, the king summoned the dragon. Meanwhile, the physician slippe ~ Gena Showalter

Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces. ~ Roger Ebert

And it happens all at once - just looking at him, I fall in love. But it doesn't matter - because I can belong to no one. ~ Ginger Scott

We were born with four words engraved on our bodies and in our hearts: Love me, hold me. ~ David Richo

Oh," said her husband, sounding deeply pleased at something he'd read in his letter.
"What?" Bridget sat up, inadvertently spilling several drops of honey on her breast.
Sadly, she succumbed to her husband's fondness for nudity soon after their marriage.
Valentine glanced up, but his gaze was immediately drawn to the honey slowly dripping down her breast.
"Val..." Bridget moved to scoop the honey up with her finger.
His hand darted out, catching hers.
"Oh, don't," he breathed, leaning over her, forcing her flat on her back.
He bent, closing his azure eyes, and licked her breast almost reverently.
She shuddered.
"It's the middle of the day," she whispered.
His eyes opened, wicked and amused. "I know. Your favorite."
She smiled up at him, threading her fingers through his golden hair. "I love you."
"And I love you," he murmured against her lips, before taking her mouth hard and possessively.
Their letters fell to the floor, abandoned, but Bridget didn't care at all.
She was with her true love and the world outside could wait. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

Free a man of the constraints that limit and inhibit his development, and you have a free human being. Freedom is the natural state of man." He looked away from the boy for a moment and recalled his youth, his own search for self. "My boy," he imparted with a ferocious passion that shook them both by the throat, "there is nothing negative about our human potential - do you understand me? God Himself created you the way you are. Do not let anyone in this world convince you otherwise. And you are capable of anything, my boy. There is and shall always be a disparity among the gifts God has granted men, but we all deserve equal consideration. All men, no matter how low, how basic, or how tormented, deserve compassion, dignified brotherhood, and respect.
"But part of respecting all men is respecting ourselves. Recognizing that God has blessed you. By embracing these gifts, we live as God lives, with love for all He has created - with an open heart. ~ Alexandra Silber

She was this girl living in a bottomless hole of her thoughts.
One day she saw a light. She felt the warmth and walked in its direction.
It was there that she found him.
He spoke to her and wove tendrils of love on her heart.
His compassion was over whelming for her.
His words, his love, his eyes- everything about him was so pure, so true.
Her heart was getting intertwined with the love he was bestowing upon her.
The mesh of affection he weaved around her heart made it breathe. And live.
Vine by vine the mesh thickened.
Today, he is her beloved. They are inseparable.
He smiles, she smiles. They weave dreams.
She loves him beyond infinity.
He has her heart strings. And as he walks, she walks with him. ~ Geetansha Sood

Do You think it matters if they're tiny or deep? he asked. Well, if they're not tiny breaths and they're not deep breaths, then they're just ... breaths. Then you're just breathing for the sake of ... breathing.
... Seize them. Feel them. Love them ... ~ K.A. Tucker

Bitches are happy, because they values fun and being with random people than being with the same and to be loved... ~ Anwesha Mohanty

I love to read, and I love Martina Cole. ~ Abbey Clancy

I love cheese and biscuits, the stronger the better. ~ Eric Bristow

There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes? ~ Marilynne Robinson

What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past times. Books, it is true, are silent as you see them on their shelves; but, silent as they are, when I enter a library I feel as if almost the dead were present, and I know if I put questions to these books they will answer me with all the faithfulness and fulness which has been left in them by the great men who have left the books with us. ~ John Bright

People create these extravagant habitats because they have vision, love of beauty, hopes and dreams. ~ Anne Rice

When you love someone, truly love them, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt-you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it's crippling-like having your heart carved out. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I came in haste with cursing breath, And heart of hardest steel; But when I saw thee cold in death, I felt as man should feel. For when I look upon that face, That cold, unheeding, frigid brown, Where neither rage nor fear has place, By Heaven! I cannot hate thee now! ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

Many times a woman can find herself latching on to the wrong kind of man because she's never experienced a healthy loving relationship with a man before. The initial example should come from a father/daughter relationship. A father's love teaches a girl how a man's love should feel. A father's love, protects, provides security and let's her know she's valued. ~ Stephan Labossiere

Now I'm a big fan [of X-files]. I had to see what all the fuss is about, and I love it. ~ Rhys Darby

There are moments in the middle of winter when all seems lost, and the darkness presses in like death, and everthing is cold, and I wake in the night shivering, and relive all I went through then. ~ Jonathan Aycliffe

The Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world was never the same again, how their whole lives were changed with new significance. ~ Frederick Buechner

I don't want to hide. I don't want to be alone. I don't want to wander off into the desert in shame and die and become vulture food. Or end up keeling over just because I'm too self-conscious to leave the house. Cause of Death: Unnecessary Loneliness. ~ Anne Clendening

I'm getting the jobs that are a gift, and also the jobs that I do because I just love them. That's ideal, for anybody. I get to enjoy the day that I go to work. I actually enjoy every minute of the day. ~ Kristin Bauer Van Straten

Paul ... informs us that "our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." From a Kingdom perspective, if it's got "flesh and blood" - if it's human - it's not our enemy. To the contrary, if it's got "flesh and blood" it's someone we're commanded to love and thus someone we're to be fighting for - even if they regard us as their enemy.
We may profoundly disagree with their political, ethical, and religious views. We may find their lifestyle disgusting. They may in fact be criminals that need to be locked up behind bars. They may threaten us and our nation. Still, from a Kingdom perspective, our struggle is never against other humans. Our struggle is rather for them and against the evil that works to oppress both them and us. ~ Gregory A. Boyd

You can measure the impeccability of your word by your level of self-love. How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your word. When you are impeccable with your word, you feel good; you feel happy and at peace. ~ Miguel Ruiz

It is finally about the quality of the conversations and silences we share, isn't it? We become strangers when we have nothing to say to each other. We die to each other, when the conversations in us die. Sometimes, a little every day, until one day we go completely silent and we are simply left looking at a stranger whose habits we know ~ Srividya Srinivasan

Jesus proclaimed the favor of God in His very first sermon. Then He sealed the deal with His death and resurrection. Favor is a function of surrender. If we don't hold out on God, God will not hold out on us. ~ Mark Batterson

A bike ride. Yes, that's it! A simple bike ride. It's what I love to do and most days I can't believe they pay me to do it. A day is not the same without it ... ~ Lance Armstrong

And in our room, we made love like flames–opening, blending, burning. We made love like animals, like gods, like dreams. Was it worth waiting for? Gods, yes. It was worth worlds, that night, worth souls, worth eternity. ~ Neil Gaiman

The world went from black and white and into color when I laid eyes on you, my love. There'll be no going back. ~ R.K. Lilley

I need the wisdom, reasoning, and apologetics of C. S. Lewis, though some of his theological beliefs are different from mine. I need the preaching and charisma of Charles Spurgeon, though his view of baptism is different from mine. I need the resurrection vision of N. T. Wright and the theology of Jonathan Edwards, though their views on church government are different from mine. I need the passion and prophetic courage of Martin Luther King Jr., the cultural intelligence of Soong-Chan Rah, and the Confessions of St. Augustine, though their ethnicities are different from mine. I need the justice impulse and communal passion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though his nationality is different from mine. I need the spiritual thirst and love drive of Brennan Manning and the prophetic wit of G. K. Chesterton, though both are Roman Catholics and I am a Protestant. I need the hymns and personal holiness of John and Charles Wesley, though some of their doctrinal distinctives are different from mine. I need the glorious weakness of Joni Eareckson Tada, the spirituality of Marva Dawn, the trusting perseverance of Elisabeth Elliot, the long-suffering spirit of Amy Carmichael, the transparency of Rebekah Lyons, the thankfulness of Ann Voskamp, the Kingdom vision of Amy Sherman, and the integrity of Patti Sauls, though their gender is different from mine. As St. Augustine reputedly said, "In nonessentials, liberty." To this we might add, "In nonessentials, open-minded receptivity." We Christians m ~ Scott Sauls

In the end, even the "yes" to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my "I", in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

I get to work with people I love who challenge and inspire me. And I get to sing songs that do that same thing! ~ Karen Mason

When death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death-sadness, questions, and policemen- and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order. ~ Chris Cleave

Take me to the land of lovers where flowers bloom with love, birds sing with love, and hearts long for hearts. ~ Debasish Mridha

He was supposed to be reading, but all he could do was watch her and love her bare arms, her Alice band, her straight back, the sweet tilt of her chin as she tucked the instrument under it ... ~ Ian McEwan