(some) quotes i like!

• There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. -- Marianne Williamson
• The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you can never have. -- Soren Kierkegaard
• To love a person means to see him as God intended him to be. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
• I want to learn to live in the now. I want to breathe my way into it and hang out there more and more and experience life in all its richness and realness. But I want to do it later, like maybe sometime early next week. Right now I want to rush. -- Anne Lamott
• The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold. -- Naomi Wolf
• It is so easy to convince yourself that you are the one who needs all the attention. But once you can see the other concretely in his or her life situation, you can step back a bit from yourself and understand that, in a true friendship, two people can make a dance. -- Henri Nouwen
• Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. -- Gunter Grass
• You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. -- Robin Williams
• Missions then is less about the transportation of God from one place to another and more about identification of a God who is already there. It is almost as if being a good missionary means having really good eyesight. Or maybe it means teaching people to use their eyes to see things that have always been there: they just didn't realize it. You see God where others don't. And then you point Him out. -- Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis)
• When I was memorizing the names of the stars, part of the purpose was to help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That's basically a Namer's job. Maybe you're supposed to make earthlings feel more human. -- Proginoskes (in A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle)
• If scarcity makes things more precious, what does it mean to choose the spare world over one in which we are sated with abundance? -- Kathleen Norris (The Cloister Walk)
• Why do we keep hiding our deepest feelings from each other? We suffer much, but we also have great gifts of healing for each other. The mystery is that by hiding our pain we also hide our ability to heal. -- Henri Nouwen
• Gently, Teacher explained the difference between a lie and a story. A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was; you told it like you thought it should have been. -- Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
• Pippin glanced in some wonder at the face now close beside his own, for the sound of that laugh had been gay and merry. Yet in the wizard's face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow; though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy: a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth. -- J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King)
• God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. The pain and fallenness of humanity have entered into his heart. Through the prism of my tears I have seen a suffering God. It is said of God that no one can behold his face and life. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said that perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. -- Nicholas Walterstorff (Lament for a Son)
• The real monastic walks through life with a barefooted soul, alert, aware, grateful, and only partially at home. -- Joan Chittister (Wisdom Distilled from the Daily)
• The next day he [Ender] passed Alai in the corridor, and they greeted each other, touched hands, talked, but they both knew that there was a wall now. It might be breached, that wall, sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken. -- Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game)
• When you start on a long journey, trees are trees, water is water, and mountains are mountains. After you have gone some distance, trees are no longer trees, water no longer water, mountains no longer mountains. But after you have traveled a great distance, trees are once again trees, water is once again water, and mountains are once again mountains. -- Zen teaching

since my sister is cool -- she created a program that will randomly select one of these quotes each time my blog is viewed. so i got to pick a few quotes that i really value (for one reason or another) and then get to share them. i'm excited about this. thanks, larq!