Poisonwood Bible Quotes

'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry and 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author's writing. ~ Tess Gerritsen

Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The animal creation shall again gladden a new Paradise as they did when Adam and Eve called them by name, and carressed them and mingled in their society. The Bible everywhere indicates that the new earth will be a counterpart of the old before the fall, so we must conclude that lower animals who were created before man and have been his companions before and since the fall will be restored with him in the "new Creation" ~ Ed Buckner

It's a sin to bore people with the Bible. ~ Howard G. Hendricks

The bible fits man for life and prepares him for death ~ Daniel Webster

In my experiences, the common critic of Christianity, when he thinks of Christianity, imagines a sort of elementary, Sunday School blunder of elements: fiery Hell, an angry God, 'try not to sin', 'be good so that you can go to Heaven', absurd miracles, hyper-fundamentalist tales, religious hypocrites, and Jesus telling people not to judge. There is no horse more dead than such. I maintain that understanding Christianity and the Bible is quite like painting a piece of art. Let a toddler paint a puppy; then let an adult who is a long-time painter paint the very same puppy. They are both paintings of the puppy, but one is far more detailed, rational, realistic, and believable than the other. One is distorted and comical; the other is proportional and lively. One can write off Theology if he so pleases, but he might not be very wise in using the toddler's painting when it comes time to identify the real puppy or when trying to confront actual men of the Faith. ~ Criss Jami

I am flawed on many obvious levels, and truthfully, I erroneously report my zip code at least two out of every ten times. So why would I write about pursuing a rich understanding of the Bible? Isn't that material reserved for the upper echelon of the church hierarchy? The ones who have "arrived"? The answer is fundamental: The insights of the Bible are not reserved for pastors, their wives, and Billy Graham. Psalm 119:130, one of the most beautiful passages concerning God's Word, says, The unfolding of Your words gives light; It gives understanding to the simple. ~ Jen Hatmaker

When I contrast the loving Jesus, comprehending all things in his ample and tender charity, with those who profess to bear his name, marking their zeal by what they do not love, it seems to me as though men, like the witches of old, had read the Bible backward, and had taken incantations out of it for evil, rather than inspiration for good. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The Bible says all men are without excuse. Even those who are given no good reason to believe and many persuasive reasons to disbelieve have no excuse, because the ultimate reason they do not believe is that they have deliberately rejected God's Holy Spirit. ~ William Lane Craig

If I were the devil I should broadcast doubts about the truths and relevance and good sense and straightforwardness of the Bible ... At all costs I should want to keep them from using their minds in a disciplined way to get the measure of its message. ~ J.I. Packer

Fifth, the redemptive-historical significance of marriage as a divine symbol in the Bible only works if the marital couple is a complementary pair. ~ Kevin DeYoung

Before you "re-think" your faith, it may be wise to examine the critics of the Bible. In the end your faith will be even stronger. ~ Billy Graham

Holy God, Holy words. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Come back to the Bible. Begin to read it. Study it and God will speak to you and change you - and through you perhaps history can be changed. ~ Billy Graham

Since the Bible has quite a lot to say about truth - and since it also has plenty to say about how particular individuals relate to that truth - it has become easy to imagine that its claims can and should be reduced to particular, and highly relative and situational, angles of vision. ~ N. T. Wright

A lot of dear folks today are either in a state of cholera morbus or St. Vitus's dance [ the twitching nerve disorder chorea]. We need to get going for God. Faith in itself has no value unless it connects you with God. The Bible is constantly trying to wake us up: "Stir up the gift of God" (2 Tim. 1:6); "Break up your fallow ground" (Hos. 10:12); "Gird up the loins of your mind" (1 Peter 1:13). We need to take ourselves by the nape of the neck and make ourselves do what we know we ought to do, whether we feel like it or not.
Some ~ Vance Havner

If your heart is not attuned to God, it will become a catch basin for every device of the devil. Yes, Satan is at work in our world. The Bible is my authority. ~ Billy Graham

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. ~ Christopher Hitchens

You didn't learn the Bible as a Fundamentalist. You learned fragments of Old Testament legalism mixed with Behaviorism & Nietzschean ethics ~ Jeri Massi

When Jesus said "Whoever eats my flesh & drinks my blood has eternal life" John 6:54 He was CLEARLY talking to Zombies & Vampires ~ Pablo

OPENING VERSES by PASTOR THIEME

HEB 4:12
The word of God is alive and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit, of the joints and marrow, and is a critic of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

2TI 3:16-17
All Scripture is God breathed and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be mature, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

2TI 2:15
Study to show yourself approved unto God as a workman who need not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. ~ R.B. Thieme Jr.

The Bible says that love is a responsibility. We are commanded to love. God doesn't ask us if we feel like it, He tells us in His Word that it is our responsibility to love. ~ David Jeremiah

The Bible condemns the use of any substance which alters or distorts our thinking (including alcohol, which was the most common drug in ancient times). ~ Billy Graham

If there was not one man Adam and one woman Eve, and a literal event of the one man Adam taking the fruit in rebellion and thus bringing sin and death into world, then one may as well throw the rest of the Bible away. ~ Ken Ham

I could almost picture how when God was reaching down and closing the door of the ark, Noah might have been in there standing on tiptoe trying to see out for as long as he could. The Bible says Noah was six hundred years old when he went into the ark. I bet he noticed things in that last minute that he hadn't paid any attention at all to for the last five hundred fifty years. I ~ Douglas Kaine McKelvey

Cowards always drag in the Bible to back theirselves up far more than proper people does ... ~ Miles Franklin

Renewal of mind begins with mediation on the word of God. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The bible is the cradle that holds the Christ, without him it is nothing more than wood and straw. ~ Martin Luther

We have to admit that there is an immeasurable distance between all that we read in the Bible and the practice of the Church and of Christians. ~ Jacques Ellul

All that has been done to weaken the foundation of an implicit faith in the Bible, as a whole, has been at the expense of the sense of religious obligation, and at the cost of human happiness. ~ J.G. Holland

I cannot read God's mind, however I can read God's Word. ~ R.C. Sproul

Work is so foundational to our makeup that it is one of the few things we can take in significant doses without harm. Indeed, the Bible does not say we should work one day and rest six or that work and rest should be balanced evenly but directs us to the opposite ratio. Leisure and pleasure are great goods, but we can take only so much of them. ~ Timothy Keller