Quote of the Day

In most professions there's a beginning, a middle, and an end.  With writing, it's always beginning again.  Temperamentally, we need that newness.  There is a lot of repetition in the work.  In fact, one skill that every writer needs is the ability to sit still in this deeply uneventful business.

-- Philip Roth

Quote of the Day

Many people find separating from their religious past emotionally challenging.  In some ways, leaving religion is like the death of a loved one.  Often, it’s a death after a prolonged illness.  Our faith has been on life support for months, even years.  Though there is sadness at its passing, there is also great relief.

-- Jim Mulholland, "Religious Grief"

Quote of the Day

Don't say you don't have enough time.  We're all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day.  People often ask me, "How do you find the time for all this?"  And I answer, "I look for it."  You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies.  You find it in the cracks between the big stuff -- your commute, your lunch break, the few hours after your kids go to bed.  You might have to miss an episode of your favorite TV show, you might have to miss an hour of sleep, but you can find the time if you look for it.

-- Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!, p. 54

Quote of the Day

We also tend to ignore the embarrassing bits, like when Paul tells Titus, "Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons" (Titus 1:12 UPDATED NIV).  I've never once heard a sermon preached on this passage, and yet, if these words are truly the inerrant and unchanging words of God intended as universal commands for all people in all places at all times, then the Christian community needs to do a better job of mobilizing against the Cretan people, perhaps constructing some "God Hates Cretans" signs, or warning Christian travelers not to get off the ship when they stop at Crete on their Mediterranean cruises, or boycotting movies starring Jennifer Aniston, whose father, I am told, is a lazy, evil, gluttonous Cretan.

-- Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, p. 260

Quote of the Day

Two millennia after Jesus taught, Christ-like change is beginning to infuse the world at many levels more widely than ever before.  So why does it seem as if so many Christians still fail to grasp the essential truth of our faith: inclusion and justice?  Maybe our blindness started when the first Christians didn't believe what Jesus told them about the kingdom of God: "Neither shall they say, Lo here!  Or, lo there!  For, behold, the kingdom of God is within in" (Luke 17:21, emphasis added).  Irrespective of Jesus' teaching we continue to tie faith to doctrine, geography, nation, male prerogatives, homophobia and race.  It is as if we've rewritten Jesus' saying as: "They shall say, Lo here!  And, Lo there!  For, behold, the kingdom of God is only found in correct doctrine believed by the chosen few of our tribe!"

-- Frank Schaeffer, Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God, p. 55

Quote of the Day

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

-- Gloria Steinem

Quote of the Day

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

-- Jack Kornfield, Buddha's Little Instruction Book, p. 32

Quote of the Day

Writing isn't hard work, it's a nightmare.

-- Philip Roth

Quote of the Day

My seven year old daughter understands repentance, but she still struggles with it.  Like many of us, she finds it difficult to admit her mistakes and say she's sorry.  Thankfully, she hasn't had the task of repenting and forgiving complicated by the insertion of god.  She doesn't have to unlearn these misconceptions.  If you damage someone, God is not the injured party.  They are.  The forgiveness of God is irrelevant if you are unwilling to express and demonstrate your repentance to the one you have damaged.  There is nothing you can do for God that absolves you of that necessity.  Indeed, as soon as you involve God in issues of repentance and forgiveness, you can be nearly certain that you aren't all that interested in either.

-- Jim Mulholland, "Avoiding Repentance"

Quote of the Day

Overnight success is a myth.  Dig into almost every overnight success story and you'll find about a decade's worth of hard work and perseverance.  Building a substantial body of work takes a long time -- a lifetime, really -- but thankfully, you don't need that time all in one big chunk.  So forget about decades, forget about years, and forget about months.  Focus on days.

-- Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!, p. 47

Quote of the Day

We forget sometimes that the Epistles are just that...epistles.  They are letters, broken pieces of correspondence between early Christians, dating back thousands of years.  In our rush to extract sound bites for our nature-themed desk calendars, we tend to skip past the initial greetings that designate the recipients of the message -- "to the church of God in Corinth," "to the churches in Galatia," "to God's holy people in Ephesus," "to Timothy," "to Titus," "to Philemon our dear friend and fellow worker -- also to Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow solider -- and to the church that meets in your home" -- and scan over the details that should remind us that we are essentially listening in on someones else's conversation...

-- Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, p. 259

Quote of the Day

... two thousand years after Jesus treated women as equals, countless fundamentalist American parents are preparing their daughters to forgo personal goals and accept subservient roles in marriages better suited to first-century Israel.  It can seem as if Jesus failed to change anything.

-- Frank Schaeffer, Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God, p. 54

Quote of the Day

With each passing month, too, I realized the importance of my First Commandment, "Be Gretchen."  As great minds throughout the ages have pointed out, one of our most pressing concerns should be to discover the laws of our own nature.  I had to build my happiness on the foundation of my character; I had to acknowledge what really made me happy, not what I wished made me happy.  One of the biggest surprises of the happiness project was just how hard it was to know myself.  I'd always been slightly exasperated by philosophers' constant emphasis on what seemed to me to be a fairly obvious question, but in the end I realized that I would spend my whole life grappling with the question of how to "Be Gretchen."

-- Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project, p. 288

Quote of the Day

Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.

-- Jack Kornfield, Buddha's Little Instruction Book, p. 31

Quote of the Day

Let's face it, writing is hell.  I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day.

-- William Styron

Quote of the Day

When you learn, teach.
When you get, give.

-- Maya Angelou, "Our Grandmothers"

Quote of the Day

Put yourself, and your work, out there every day, and you'll start meeting some amazing people.

-- Bobby Solomon

Quote of the Day

I think the strangest thing I heard was that a women preaching on a Sunday morning would inevitably lead to the acceptance of bestiality.  Part of me wanted to end the sermon with, "Okay, so how many of you want to have sex with a monkey now?"

-- Jackie Roese

Quote of the Day

Oppression is most powerful when internalized and self-imposed.

-- Frank Schaeffer, Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God, p. 52

Quote of the Day

One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy.  One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.

-- Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project, p. 285

Quote of the Day

Life is so hard, how can we be anything but kind?

-- Jack Kornfield, Buddha's Little Instruction Book, p. 30

Quote of the Day

(George Gershwin) was dismissive of inspiration, saying that if he waited for the muse he would compose at most three songs a year.

-- Mason Currey, Daily Rituals, p. 133

Quote of the Day

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

-- Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise"

Quote of the Day

You have to make stuff.  No one is going to give a damn about your resume; they want to see what you have made with your own little fingers.

-- David Carr

Quote of the Day

I've watched congregations devote years and years to heated arguments about whether a female missionary should be allowed to share about her ministry on a Sunday morning, whether students older than ten should have female Sunday school teachers, whether girls should be encouraged to attend seminary, whether women should be permitted to collect the offering or write the church newsletter or make an announcement ... all while thirty thousand children die every day from preventable disease.  If that's not an adventure in missing the point, I don't know what is.

-- Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, p. 255

Quote of the Day

Want to be sure you have THE TRUTH about yourself and want to be consistent to that truth?  Then prepare to go mad.  Or prepare to turn off your brain and cling to some form or other of fundamentalism, be that religious or secular.

-- Frank Schaeffer, Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God, p. 19

Quote of the Day

Enthusiasm is a form of social courage.

-- Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project, p. 269

Quote of the Day

Good-humored patience is necessary with mischievous children and your own mind.

-- Jack Kornfield, Buddha's Little Instruction Book, p. 29

Quote of the Day

My life is as simple as I can make it.

-- Philip Larkin

Quote of the Day

"Greet Andronicus and Junia," Paul wrote in Romans 16:7, "my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me.  They are outstanding among the apostles..."  Junia is one of nine women mentioned by Paul in (his letter to the church at Rome) ... But as time went on, the mention of a female apostle in Scripture became inconvenient for the increasingly hierarchal Church, so a medieval theologian found a creative solution to the problem: he turned Junia into a man.  Andronicus and Junia became Andronicus and Junias.

-- Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, p. 247-248

Quote of the Day

The one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems [is] that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggression and hypocrisy.

-- Thomas Merton