The 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

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

Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I read the Bible, I speak through issues, I see what I think is hypocrisy in the church and things that are wrong, and I speak to these things. But I could be wrong. ~ Tony Campolo

Grandmother's knee is a wonderful place to learn about the Bible, ghosts, and even Santa Claus, but a mighty poor place to learn about history. ~ L.B. Taylor Jr.

I am in a two-stoplight town in the Alabama hill country, in the heart of the Bible Belt and Crimson Tide football mania, listening to an old-fashioned, heated argument between Cubans like the ones I've heard in Little Havana in Miami, but the moment very quickly loses its sense of strangeness and cultural dissonance. This is what America is like now
North America, I mean, the United States. The craziness of cubanos and mexicanos and guatemaltecos can find you just about anywhere ~ Hector Tobar

Job is an optimist. He shakes the pillars of the world and strikes insanely at the heavens; he lashes the stars, but it is not to silence them; it is to make them speak. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Your poor lungs." "We're not gonna live long enough to get cancer. The Bible says there's just seven years of Tribulation after the Rapture. ~ Tom Perrotta

Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation ... the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against 'Sabbath Laws', the uses of the 'Bible in School', and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce 'God in the Constitution. ~ Matilda Joslyn Gage

I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It's pretty wild. I hadn't heard of it until I was in college. ~ Tom Perrotta

No books is more fascinating than the Bible. And no books are less fascinating than most of our commentaries on the Bible. Nothing is more formidable and unconquerable than the Church Militant. But nothing is more sleepy and sheepish than the Church Mumbling. Christ's words roused His enemies to murder and His friends to martyrdom. Our words reassure both sides and send them to sleep. He put the world in a daze. We put it in a doze. ~ Peter Kreeft

Perhaps when I was a child. Then my brain fully developed and I started thinking about the logic. The Christian life is no life for this man. I have a potent predilection for the whiskey, weed and women. I like to defile all three of them, sometimes simultaneously. But yeah, it isn't the fairytale within the bible that makes me such an infidel, I just couldn't suffer waking up early on Sundays to praise a magical being that lacks significant proof. ~ J.C. Wickhart

Don't say God is silent when your Bible is closed. Open it and read it. God will speak. ~ Adam Cappa

By 1833 the largest publisher in America, Harper and Company, boasted one horse-powered printing press and seven hand presses while the American Bible Society owned 16 new state-of-the-art, steam-driven presses and 20 hand presses. ~ Phil Cooke

I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don't allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday. ~ Maya Angelou

The only book in our home was the Bible. My parents forbade books. They thought I needed help because I wanted to be a writer! ~ Ken Bruen

At least to look back over their own lives, as I have looked back over mine, for certain themes and patterns and signals that are so easy to miss when you're caught up in the process of living them. If God speaks to us at all other than through such official channels as the Bible and the church, then I think he speaks to us largely through what happens to us, so listen to what has happened to you-for the sound, above all else, of his voice. ~ Frederick Buechner

We often forget that God has emotions, too. He feels things very deeply. The Bible tells us that God grieves, gets jealous and angry, and feels compassion, pity, sorrow, and sympathy as well as happiness, gladness, and satisfaction. God loves, delights, gets pleasure, rejoices, enjoys, and even laughs!2 ~ Rick Warren

Many people are calling Manti Te'o "dumb" or "naïve" because he fell for the "invisible girlfriend" hoax or catfishing but when you think about it. Religion MIGHT be doing the same thing when it tells you that there is a "God" that you cannot see, or meet, that loves you, & "communicates" with you thru a book (bible).Does that make sense? ~ Pablo

I have a Bible near my bed. ~ Donald Trump

The great GOD is a tower of refuge to the poor.
The great GOD is a tower of refuge to the needy in distress. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There's a verse in the Bible says, 'In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.' And what brings me peace is the scripture. ~ Tammy Faye Bakker

Human life is created in God's image, and that makes it sacred. ~ Colin S. Smith

Go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant - they're quite clear - that we would create law based on the God of the bible and the Ten Commandments. ~ Sarah Palin

[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss]
[Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion. ~ Gerhard Falk

While the Bible does speak clearly on many matters - you'd have to be deaf not to hear the condemnations of murder, stealing, adultery, greed, etc. - there are, in fact, many questions at the margins of each of these, for which there are not clear answers. If you are not a pastor it's easier to maintain the comforting illusion that these hard cases are rare. But they are not. ~ Ken Wilson

A cat and a Bible, and nobody needs to be lonely. ~ Mary Roberts Rinehart

people have managed to marry without arithmetic ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

My stupidity need not be the end of me, for if I surrender my stupidity to God it will in fact become the beginning of me. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I know the fucking Bible, and there ain't no fucking Book of Leviathan. ~ Dan Simmons

If every Christian read Bible, they know that God's grace for us is Jesus Christ. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

His crimped hair was subtly frosted, making him look like a preacher in some California church - the kind with acoustic guitars and headset microphones and not much use for the actual Bible. ~ John Wray

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible. ~ Anthony Burgess

All our sins are offensive to God and require forgiveness. But over and over the Bible teaches that some sins are worse than others. ~ Kevin DeYoung

You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock ... ' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness ... and laugh at persons who give in to them. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If Jesus has to do it all over again, there will be more people shouting "Crucify him".You are not here to make the world a better place. Mark 15:13 ~ Felix Wantang

There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees a complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost canonical status in Protestant theology. But now we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical. ~ Karl Barth

For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. ~ Jeri Smith-Ready