Thomas Story Kirkbride Quotes

There is no reason why an individual, who has the misfortune to become insane, should, on that account, be deprived of any comfort or even luxury... ~ Thomas Story Kirkbride

The best way to understand another person's religion is to listen to the story of what particular practices helped them to deepen and to embody their religion, especially its spirituality. ~ Thomas Keating

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

Everyone you meet along the way is just someone at a different point in their story.
So be patient and kind.
But don't let anyone tell you how your story should go. ~ Iain S. Thomas

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load. ~ Thomas Steinbeck

I picked up a snake once. In Italy."
"Why did you do that?"
"For a bet."
"Was it poisonous?"
"We didn't know. That was the point of the bet."
"Did it bite you?"
"Of course."
"Why of course?"
"It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid? ~ Hilary Mantel

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

It is said in those districts that not all the trains which run on the city's tracks are listed in Metropolitan Transit's compendious schedule. The residents will tell you that after midnight, on some nights, there will be other trains, trains whose cry is different, the bellow of some great beast fighting for its life. And if you watch those trains go past, behind those bright flickering windows you will see passengers unlike any passengers you have seen when riding the trains yourself: men with wings, women with horns, beast-headed children, fauns and dryads and green-skinned people more beautiful than words can describe. In 1893, a schoolteacher swore that she saw a unicorn; in 1934, a murderer turned himself into the police, weeping, saying that he saw his victims staring at him from a train as it howled past the station platform on which he stood.
These are the seraphic trains. The stories say they run to Heaven, Hell, and Faërie. They are omens, but no one can agree on what they portend. And although you will never meet anyone who has seen or experienced it, there are persistent rumors, unkillable rumors, that sometimes, maybe once a century, maybe twice, a seraphic train will stop in its baying progress and open its doors for a mortal.
Those who know the story of Thomas the Rhymer - and even some who don't - insist that all these people, blest or damned as they may be, must be poets. ~ Sarah Monette

Life is simple: We are living in a word that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything
in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. You cannot be without God. It's impossible. It's simple impossible. The only thing is that we don't see it. What is it that makes the world opaque? It is care. ~ Thomas Merton

It's hard to say where a story begins and ends. You have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. Somewhere between perception and reality. Between what is spoken and what is heard. Between what is written and what is edited out. I know this, you can't have an ending without a beginning. Even if they are really just random pieces of the middle that tend to stand out. Staccato notes on the page. Points on a circle. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

One of my biggest influences as a writer is J. K. Rowling. I grew up with Harry Potter. One thing I absolutely loved was how every single person in Harry's world was so three-dimensional - it was as if each one was the main character in his or her own story and was just making a guest appearance in Harry's story. I strive to do that as a writer. I want every side character to be the main character of his or her own story. ~ Angie Thomas

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale's story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full (1998).52 ~ Epictetus

I had begun to comprehend that the Bible's story is about the relationship of God to human beings, and of human beings to one another, and that this meant that it is our friendships, marriages, families, and even church congregations that best reveal what kind of theology we have, who our God is. Or, as Thomas Merton once put it, "because we love, God is present." That is the story. ~ Kathleen Norris

Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all. ~ Evan Thomas

There is only one story. ~ Thomas C. Foster

I'm a voyeur. I say that with no embarrassment. If I could have a superpower, being invisible would be it, no question. I'm fascinated by human behavior; observing people and seeing how much story gets told without a lot of dialogue, and how much our brain fills in. ~ Thomas Schlamme

I know who you are," the Chicano said to Thomas. "You're that Indian guy did all the talking." "Yeah," one of the African men said. "You're that storyteller. Tell us some stories, chief, give us the scoop." Thomas looked at these five men who shared his skin color, at the white man who shared this bus which was going to deliver them into a new kind of reservation, barrio, ghetto, logging-town tin shack. He then looked out the window, through the steel grates on the windows, at the freedom just outside the glass. He saw wheat fields, bodies of water, and bodies of dark-skinned workers pulling fruit from trees and sweat from thin air. Thomas closed his eyes and told this story. ~ Sherman Alexie

Every day is different, every day I'm on an adventure. If I get bored, you can bet that in the story I'm writing, bullets will fly. ~ Jodi Thomas

Funny how people that don't believe in nothin' are so quick to believe every crazy story about people like us. ~ Dean Koontz

Cut Africa out of the Bible and Christian memory, and you have misplaced many pivotal scenes of salvation history. It is the story of the children of Abraham in Africa; Joseph in Africa; Moses in Africa; Mary, Joseph and Jesus in Africa; and shortly thereafter Mark and Perpetua and Athanasius and Augustine in Africa. ~ Thomas C. Oden

What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race? ~ Thomas Sowell

This need to know things at the level of basic experience, and the reluctance to be fobbed off by the official story or the popular rumor, was a part of the "infinite capacity for taking pains" that Thomas Carlyle once described as the constituent of genius. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Now he could work her likeness into any story of his choosing. Now he could fight dragons for her. And now he could kiss her again. ~ Sherry Thomas

Cooking is mythology - a story told over and over, passed on again and again, always with the same meaning but expressed in endlessly different ways. ~ Anna Thomas

Stop and listen. The story is everywhere. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

For Chuang Tzu, the truly great man is therefore not the man who has, by a lifetime of study and practice, accumulated a great fund of virtue and merit, but the man in whom "Tao acts without impediment," the "man of Tao." Several of the texts in this present book describe the "man of Tao." Others tell us what he is not. One of the most instructive, in this respect, is the long and delightful story of the anxiety-ridden, perfectionistic disciple of Keng Sang Chu, who is sent to Lao Tzu to learn the "elements." He is told that "if you persist in trying to attain what is never attained ... in reasoning about what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed. ~ Thomas Merton

She knew how to hit to a hair's breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty ... At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed, they were. The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other. ~ Thomas Hardy

It is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. ~ Thomas Paine

Solitary writers come out of nowhere and do not belong anywhere. They are not domesticated or socialized, not as writers. Their subject is not the world about them but the one within them. From story to story or poem to poem, they repeat themselves because all they have to work with are themselves and their dreams, which are strange dreams and often bad dreams. As anyone knows, nothing is more troublesome to communicate than yourself and your dreams, the feelings and visions that have molded you into what you are. ~ Thomas Ligotti

The portal structure is simply a technique: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary, except as the writer and the story make it so. In the case of 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,' it was absolutely necessary to my intentions. ~ Stephen R. Donaldson

We have to bring our imaginations to bear on a story if we are to see all it's possibilitiess; otherwise it's just about somebody who did something. Whatever we take away from stories in the way of significance, symbolism, theme, meaning, pretty much anything except character and plot, we discover because our imagination engages with that of the author. Pretty amazing when you consider that the author may have been dead for thousands of years, yet we can still have this exchange, this dialogue, with her. ~ Thomas C. Foster

I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens. ~ Scarlett Thomas

In Eudora Welty's masterful story "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941), the narrator is engaged in a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, who has come home after leaving under suspicious if not actually disgraceful circumstances. The narrator, Sister, is outraged at having to cook two chickens to feed five people and a small child just because her "spoiled" sister has come home. What Sister can't see, but we can, is that those two fowl are really a fatted calf. It may not be a grand feast by traditional standards, but it is a feast, as called for upon the return of the Prodigal Son, even if the son turns out to be a daughter. Like the brothers in the parable, Sister is irritated and envious that the child who left, and ostensibly used up her "share" of familial goodwill, is instantly welcomed, her sins so quickly forgiven. Then ~ Thomas C. Foster

The experimental version of this story could actually be told as two stories happening "simultaneously," each narrated in alternating sections which take place in parallel chronologies. One section begins with the death of Nathan and moves backward in time, while its counterpart story begins with the death of the original owner of the magical pants and moves forward. Needless to say, the facts in the case of Nathan must be juggled around so as to be comprehensible from the beginning, that is to say from the end. ~ Thomas Ligotti

I read Wolfe's new book _ The Story of a Novel_ and as usual he stole the whole damn thing from me. I am going to write and say will you please stop writing books you bastard. ~ Jean Stafford

A good story defies the reader's expectations, and in doing so, brings them satisfaction. ~ Thomas Maltman