Good Words from Good Books

"I have to wait again, before putting the frosting on.  The waiting is hard.  I want everything to be delicious all at once.  I want to skip over the hard parts, the boring parts, the lonely and sad and angry parts.  But if I do that, the cake won't be good.  It won't be right. So I wait.  Even though it's uncomfortable and too hot in the kitchen.  Even though I don't feel like waiting for the good part."  p. 324 "'Lawrence would have loved this,' Naomi says.  It's a sad sentence; a sentence that makes us miss him a little bit more. But like the cake, the missing is a little sweet, too, a little wonderful, a little sad, a little messy and crooked and delicate and strange."  p. 325-326 "No one's smiling right now, listening to a sad story about losing a job, but we're all together.  It doesn't look sunny and beautiful and perfect.  It's so much better than that... Love, in the way we take care of each other wh

"I only want my rights.  I'm not asking for anybody's bleeding charity. " "Then do.  At once.  Ask for the Bleeding Charity.  Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought."  p. 28 "The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness."  p. 69 "Heaven is reality itself.  All that is fully real is Heavenly."  p. 70-71 "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, ' Thy  will be done.  All that are in Hell, choose it.  Without that self-choice there could be no Hell."  p. 75 "You cannot love a fellow-creature fully until you love God."  p. 100 "Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they canno

"...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."  p. 66 "The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity--even under the most difficult circumstances--to add a deeper meaning to his life.  It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish.  Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and becomes no more than an animal.  Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him."  p. 67 "He who has a why  to live for can bear with almost any how."  (Frankl quoting Nietzsche) "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen tas