The Sin Collector Quotes

I screeched with frustration, which in hindsight is never okay when there are people trying to kill you. ~ Jessica Fortunato

Her name is Emmilina. She is quite eccentric and was Thomas's best friend. ~ Jessica Fortunato

I was sick of the body count that existed around my family. It seemed statistically that eventually the body count would include my family. ~ Jessica Fortunato

Truth was, I didn't really want to die today. I was in the middle of a really good book, and being alive had always worked out for me ... ~ Jessica Fortunato

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. ~ Anonymous

Grace."
He drew out the word so it became a long, deep, guttural growl. A sound as primitive as a lion's roar for its mate. Her skin prickled with animal awareness and the breath caught in her throat. Every drop of moisture evaporated from her mouth. Low in her belly, blood began to beat slow and hard with anticipation.
Her face must have betrayed her unfurling arousal. Or perhaps, like her, he reacted to the sudden charge in the air, as electric as the pause before a lightning strike.
Still without shifting his fierce focus, he set down the box he carried. Then he reached to close the doors and slide the bolt across.
Any doubt as to his purpose fled. A delicious thrill rippled through her. The summerhouse was raised on a platform so the windows opened above eye height. With the doors locked, it was a bower designed for private sin.
Sin was clearly his aim.
Now she looked more closely, she realized it wasn't anger that tightened the skin over the bones of his face. It was incendiary hunger.
She should protest. Question. Demand he tell her why he was here. But overwhelming need kept her silent and pinned to the window seat. ~ Anna Campbell

Sin in the theater, I can observe now, is comparable to education in a university: it is there for those who wish to take advantage of it, but fewer do than you might suspect. ~ Billie Burke

For virtue is a light and buoyant thing, and all who live in her way fly like clouds as Isaiah says, and as doves with their young ones; but sin is a heavy affair, as another of the prophets says, sitting upon a talent of lead. ~ Gregory Of Nyssa

I discovered that everything you do is in response to a request or a suggestion made to you by some other party either inside you or outside. Some of these suggestions are good and praiseworthy and some of them are undoubtedly delightful. But the majority of them are definitely bad and are pretty considerable sins as sins go. ~ Flann O'Brien

Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her. ~ John 8 7

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
(Speech in the House of Commons, 11 November 1947) ~ Winston S. Churchill

The robot said, 'I have been trying, friend Julius, to understand some remarks Elijah made to me earlier. Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of thi sevil into what you call good.'
He hesitated, then, almost as though he were surprised at his own owrds, he said, 'Go, and sin no more! ~ Isaac Asimov

But either way, the fruit of turning to God - before we sin, after we've sinned, even right there in the middle of our sin - is where Christians go to experience the flavors of God-fearing honor, gratitude, dependence, worship, confidence, trust, freedom, revival. Even those sins from our past that have been the most regrettable, the most difficult to move beyond - the ones we'd give anything if we could go back and do over again - Christ is able to redeem and rewrite even those into masterful sequels and come-from-behind victories. He takes what's given us fits for so long and gives us instead a reason to celebrate what He's done. To celebrate our redemption. To celebrate our Redeemer. ~ Matt Chandler

Six kinds of aggressors are at once to be killed, and no sin is incurred by killing such aggressors. They are (1) a poison giver, (2) one who sets fire to the house, (3) one who attacks with deadly weapons, (4) one who plunders riches, (5) one who occupies another's land, and (6) one who kidnaps a wife. ~ Mahaprabhu Das

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but theft is a sin. ~ Elena

The inevitable result of borrowed faith is lost faith. People born into a family anchored in Christendom tend to assume they're right with God, regardless of whether they personally turn from sin and trust in Jesus. ~ Mark Driscoll

Either sin must drown in the tears of repentance - or the soul must burn in hell. ~ Thomas Watson

Francis Spufford, using very contemporary idiom, calls for the same thing in this way. When discussing our sinfulness, he says: What we're talking about here is not just our tendency to lurch and stumble and screw up by accident, our passive role as agents of entropy. It's our active inclination to break stuff, "stuff" here including . . . promises, relationships we care about and our own well-being and other people's. . . . [You are] a being whose wants make no sense, don't harmonize: whose desires deep down are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to at the very same time. You're equipped, you realize, more for farce (or even tragedy) than happy endings. . . . You're human, and that's where we live; that's our normal experience.180 Until we fully acknowledge the chaos within us that the Bible calls sin, we live in what Calvin calls "unreality. ~ Timothy J. Keller

He got fired because he didn't report the incident, and so no one else had the opportunity to learn from it. Not sharing an opportunity to learn is a cardinal sin." Cultures ~ Charles Duhigg

Very harmful effects can follow accepting the philosophy which denies personal guilt or sin and thereby makes everyone nice. By denying sin, the nice people make a cure impossible. Sin is most serious, and the tragedy is deepened by the denial that we are sinners ... The really unforgiveable sin is the denial of sin, because, by its nature, there is now nothing to be forgiven. By refusing to admit to personal guilt, the nice people are made into scandalmongers, gossips, talebearers, and supercritics, for they must project their real if unrecognized guilt to others. This, again, gives them a new illusion of goodness: the increase of faultfinding is in direct ratio and proportion to the denial of sin. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

The absurd is sin without God. ~ Albert Camus

Yon Kippur. Greatest Jewish holiday ever. The Jewish day of attonement. You don't ear for one day, all your sins for the year are wiped clean. Beat that with your little Lent. What is Lent? Forty days of absolution. Forty days to one day. Even in sin you're paying retail. ~ Jon Stewart

That done, I sank into an uneasy sleep wherein I dreamed of an assembly line of pale, bloodless girls walking down an endless dark street and moaning softly for help. Somewhere, toward the edge of my inner vision, a shadowy figure pursued them with long, beckoning arms.
Goddamn booze!
Somewhere in the midst of this ghoulish girl parade Cairncross materialized and hung a garland of garlic around my neck, glaring at me with his good eye and intoning, 'Go and sin no more.'
Vincenzo appeared at Cairncross' side and together they laughed insanely, then vanished in a puff of sulphurous smoke.
I made several high-minded resolutions, muttered half-heard but sincere-sounding prayers to all the recently deposed saints, thrashed and rolled clean off the bed.
I might just as well have stayed up. ~ Jeff Rice

His providences, if duly observed, promote holiness by stopping up our way to sin. O, if men would but note the designs of God in his preventive providences, how useful would it be to keep them upright and holy in their ways! For why is it that the Lord so often hedges up our way with thorns, as it is in Hosea ii. 6, but that we should not find our paths to sin? ~ John Flavel

Only three things are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since we can do nothing with the first two, we must do what we can with the third. ~ John F. Kennedy

John Duns Scotus, OFM, taught that the opposite of good was not bad but nonbeing itself. The opposite of truth was not falsity but nonbeing itself. And the opposite of unity was not multiplicity but nonbeing itself. All the opposites are all held and contained within pure being, even the finite and the infinite, matter and Spirit, male and female, etc., and this harmony between things is called beauty, which for some is a fourth transcendental itself. This worldview creates a very positive theology and anthropology based on original blessing instead of original sin. It also creates a philosophical basis for nondual thinking and the nature of evil. Evil is nonbeing and unconsciousness. Beauty is the fullness of being and full consciousness. ~ Richard Rohr

The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State. ~ Simone Weil

How many homes are broken because of men and women who are unfaithful! God will not hold you guiltless! There is a day of reckoning. "Be sure your sin will find you out" (Numbers 32:23 ESV). They will find you out in your own family life here in your relationship with your mate; they will find you out in the life to come. ~ Billy Graham

He heard an eery, dry whispering whose source and distance he could not at once determine. Sometimes it seemed at his very ear, and then it ebbed away as if sinking into profound subterranean vaults. But the sound, though variable in this manner, never ceased entirely; and it seemed to shape itself into words that the listener almost understood: words that were fraught with the hopeless sorrow of a dead man who had sinned long ago, and had repented his sin through black sepulchral ages. ~ Clark Ashton Smith

Rather than providing him with economic opportunity, the Act of that name seems designed to make the poor man do penance all his life for the sin of being born into a non-capital-owning family ... One searches it in vain for measure designed to provide economic opportunity to the capital owner. But nobody proposes to educate, train, or rehabilitate either him or his children, even when their "unemployment" is notorious. ~ Louis O. Kelso

And in the sin of wanting
always to be right, the punishment
is knowing it isn't possible. ~ Jennifer Clarvoe

A Prayer Found in Chester Cathedral Give me good digestion, Lord, And also something to digest; Give me a healthy body, Lord, With sense to keep it at its best. Give me a healthy mind, good Lord, To keep the good and pure in sight; Which, seeing sin, is not appalled, But finds a way to set it right. Give me a mind that is not bored, That does not whimper, whine or sigh; Don't let me worry overmuch About the fussy thing called 'I'. Give me a sense of humour, Lord, Give me the grace to see a joke; To get some happiness from life, And pass it on to other folk. - Anonymous ~ John Boyes

That's the unforgivable sin, you know."
"What is?"
"Refusing to forgive someone."
"Refusing to forgive someone is the unforgivable sin?" I asked incredulously. ~ Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

When we sin, we are often upset, not because we have grieved the Spirit but because our pride has been injured. ~ Vance Havner

Men lose all the material things they leave behind them in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and the alms they give. For these, they will receive from the Lord the reward and recompense they deserve. ~ Francis Of Assisi

Wine and women make wise men dote and forsake God's law and do wrong.
However, the fault is not in the wine, and often not in the woman. The fault is in the one who misuses the wine or the woman or other of God's crations. Even if you get drunk on the wine and through this greed you lapse into lechery, the wine is not to blame but you are, in being unable or unwilling to discipline yourself. And even if you look at a woman and become caught up in her beauty and assent to sin [= adultery; extramarital sex], the woman is not to blame nor is the beauty given her by God to be disparaged: rather, you are to blame for not keeping your heart more clear of wicked thoughts ... If you feel yourself tempted by the sight of a woman, control your gaze better ... You are free to leave her. Nothing constrains you to commit lechery but your own lecherous heart. ~ Anonymous

You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more? ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Told often enough that they are the source of sin, women may well begin feeling guilty as they accept the necessity for penance. Taught effectively enough that they are irrelevant to the important processes of society, women begin to feel they are living invisibly. ~ Sandra M. Gilbert Susan Gubar

I have heard stories from the depths of human lives where men and women were wrestling with the elemental problems of misery and sin--stories that put upon a man's heart a burden of vicarious sorrow, even though he does but listen to them. Here was real human need crying out after the living God revealed in Christ. Consider all the multitudes of men who so need God, and then think of Christian churches making of themselves a cockpit of controversy when there is not a single thing at stake in the business. So much of it does not matter! And there is one thing that does matter--more than anything else in all the world--that men in their personal lives and in their social relationships should know Jesus Christ. ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

I choose you." This is the foundation of true, lasting relationships. It is the foundation for God's relationship with you. As Jesus declared to His disciples, "You did not choose Me, but I chose you..." 1 Jesus chose you in the most difficult of circumstances. He chose you while you were in sin, while you were His enemy. His side of the relationship with you does not depend upon your choice, but entirely upon His choice. The question is whether or not you will learn to build your relationships with Him and others upon the foundation of your choice. ~ Danny Silk

in a single instant, can the consciousness of the sin that has been committed in thoughts, words, and actions of our past life, be unfolded to us. When once the conscience is awakened, it springs up in the heart spontaneously, and God awakens the conscience when we least expect it. Then we can find no excuse for ourselves; the deed is there and bears witness against us. ~ Hans Christian Andersen

The very first evidence of awakening grace is dissatisfaction with one's self and self-effort and a longing for deliverance from chains of sin that have bound the soul. To own frankly that I am lost and guilty is the prelude to life and peace. It is not a question of a certain depth of grief and sorrow, but simply the recognition and acknowledgment of need that lead one to turn to Christ for refuge. None can perish who put their trust in Him. His grace superabounds above all our sin, and His expiatory work on the cross is so infinitely precious to God that it fully meets all our uncleanness and guilt. ~ H. A Ironside

Every sin is the result of collaboration. ~ Stephen Crane

Mike Shea became a medic during the war and was now married, working for Pfizer. To this day he can't look at her straight. To this day she can't quite convince herself that the sin was as grave as it seemed. (She thought, in fact, of telling the priest as he whispered his furious admonitions that she weighed barely a hundred pounds and was as thin as a boy and if he would adjust his imagination accordingly and see the buds of her breasts and her flat stomach and the bony points of her hips, he would understand that even buck naked, her body was not made for mortal sin.) She can ~ Alice McDermott

When seeing the simple truth means recognizing that we're in sin, we would rather see things as being complicated. ~ Anna Sofia Botkin

Flirting is the sin of the virtuous and the virtue of the
sinful. ~ Paul Bourget