John Quotes

I was surprised. I'd always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn't dumb.

We're all running away. Some of us just don't get very far.

At Learning's fountain it is sweet to drink, But 'tis a nobler privilege to think.

Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.

Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.

No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness.

He really was beautiful. I know boys aren’t supposed to be, but he was.

I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?

Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway

but there was nothing I could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intra cranial firecrackers

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

Outside the hospital, I squinted in the harsh morning sunlight. I could hear birds chirping in the tree, but even though I searched for them, they remained hidden from me.

... I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.

I feel like I might start crying and that I'm going to cry pee.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man's.

There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.

I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?

It doesn't sound so far-fetched, right? When two people love each other? While a part of me still wants to believe it's possible, I know it's not going to happen

The overriding reason why we should take other people's cultures seriously is because God has taken ours seriously.

His anger was as great as mine, but hot where mine was cold.

That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-mouth sleep.

The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

For desert, maybe we can split a couple of crumbs.

Whisper to the flashing water your real name, write your signature in the sand, and shout your identity to the sky until it answers to you in thunder.

The end comes to all of us...but the end comes quicker to those who do not live their lives as they choose. If your life is not your own, then in what way is it living?

Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.

The triune God exercises total government over all things, and He requires us as His image-bearers to exercise government in Christ in our own spheres in terms of His law.

The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic

There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.

In the houses of the humble a little library in my opinion is a most precious possession.

All hurt is brain hurt.

It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

All Stories are True.

Home's where you go when you run out of homes.

I used to think it was mere homesickness, then I started getting it at home.

Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.

Her primary reason for living and my primary reason for living were awfully entangled.

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

There’s no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural.

Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.

Ergo: girls should always make the first move, because (a) they are, on the whole, less likely to be rejected than guys, (b) that way, girls will never get kissed unless they want to be kissed.