The wonderful thing QUOTES

1 " We could all do with a bit more joy in our lives couldn't we? The wonderful thing is that when we start spreading joy, we begin to actually experience more joy in our lives too! "

― Steve Goodier

2 " Do you hold fond memories in your heart which you would like to experience again? Have you made mistakes which you wish you could go back and correct? Has life turned out differently than you ever planned for or expected? The wonderful thing about Second Chances is that you get to take what was once created or has already happened and REDO it to make it better. "

― Susan C. Young

3 " Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open. "

― Laura Bush

4 " You're a Dark One," said Anton. " All you see in everything is evil, treachery, trickery." " All I do is not close my eyes to them," Edgar retorted. " And that's why I don't trust Zabulon. I distrust him almost as much as I do Gesar. I can even trust you more—you're just another unfortunate chess piece who happens by chance to be painted a different color from me. Does a white pawn hate a black one? No. Especially if the two pawns have their heads down together over a quiet beer or two." " You know," Anton said in a slightly surprised voice, " I just don't understand how you can carry on living if you see the world like that. I'd just go and hang myself." " So you don't have any counterarguments to offer?" Anton took a gulp of beer too. The wonderful thing about this natural Czech beer was that even if you drank lots of it, it still didn't make your head or your body feel heavy... Or was that an illusion?" Not a single one," Anton admitted. " Right now, this very moment, not a single one. But I'm sure you're wrong. It's just difficult to argue about the colors of the rainbow with a blind man. There's something missing in you... I don't know what exactly. But it's something very important, and without it you're more helpless than a blind man. "

5 " What is so rewarding about friendship?” my son asked, curling his upper lip into a sour expression. “Making friends takes too much time and effort, and for what?”

I sat on the edge of his bed, understanding how it might seem simpler to go at life solo.

“Friendship has unique rewards,” I told him. “They can be unpredictable. For instance....” I couldn’t help but pause to smile crookedly at an old memory that was dear to my heart. Then I shared with my son an unforgettable incident from my younger years.

“True story. When I was about your age, I decided to try out for a school play. Tryouts were to begin after the last class of the day, but first I had to run home to grab a couple props for the monologue I planned to perform during tryouts. Silly me, I had left them at the house that morning. Luckily, I only lived across a long expanse of grassy field that separated the school from the nearest neighborhood. Unluckily, it was raining and I didn’t have an umbrella.

“Determined to get what I needed, I raced home, grabbed my props, and tore back across the field while my friend waited under the dry protection of the school’s wooden eaves. She watched me run in the rain, gesturing for me to go faster while calling out to hurry up or we would be late.

“The rain was pouring by that time which was added reason for me to move fast. I didn’t want to look like a wet rat on stage in front of dozens of fellow students. Don’t ask me why I didn’t grab an umbrella from home—teenage pride or lack of focus, I’m not sure—but the increasing rain combined with the hollering from my friend as well as my anxious nerves about trying out for the play had me running far too fast in shoes that lacked any tread.

“About a yard from the sidewalk where the grass was worn from foot traffic and consequently muddied from the downpour of rain, I slipped and fell on my hind end. Me, my props, and my dignity slid through the mud and lay there, coated. My things were dripping with mud. I was covered in it. I felt my heart plunge, and I wanted to cry. I probably would have if it hadn’t been for the wonderful thing that happened right then. My crazy friend ran over and plopped herself down in the mud beside me. She wiggled in it, making herself as much a mess as I was. Then she took my slimy hand in hers and pulled us both to our feet. We tried out for the play looking like a couple of swine escaped from a pigsty, laughing the whole time. I never did cry, thanks to my friend.

“So yes, my dear son, friendship has its unique rewards—priceless ones. "

― Richelle E. Goodrich , Slaying Dragons: Quotes, Poetry, & a few Short Stories for Every Day of the Year

6 " I do not know you, my friends, not individually, most of you, but this is the wonderful thing about the work of a preacher, he does not need to know his congregation. Do you know why? Because I know the most important thing about every single one of you, and that is that each of you is a vile sinner. I do not care who you are, because all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. I do not care what particular form your sin takes. There is a great deal of attention paid to that today. The preacher is not interested in that. I do not want a catalogue of your sins. I do not care what your sins are. They can be very respectable or they can be heinous, vile, foul, filthy. It does not matter, thank God. But what I have authority to tell you is this. Though you may be the vilest man or woman ever known, and though you may until this moment have lived your life in the gutters and the brothels of sin in every shape and form, I say this to you: be it known unto you that through this man, this Lord Jesus Christ, is preached unto you the forgiveness of sin. And by him all who believe, you included, are at this very moment justified entirely and completely from everything you have ever done— if you believe that this is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and that he died there on the cross, for your sins and to bear your punishment. If you believe that, and thank him for it, and rely utterly only upon him and what he has done, I tell you, in the name of God, all your sins are blotted out completely, as if you had never sinned in your life, and his righteousness is put on you and God sees you perfect in his Son. That is the message of the cross, that is Christian preaching, that it is our Lord who saves us, by dying on the cross, and that nothing else can save us, but that that can save whosoever believeth in him. "

― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

7 " The Sleeping

I have imagined all this:
In 1940 my parents were in love
And living in the loft on West 10th
Above Mark Rothko who painted cabbage roses
On their bedroom walls the night they got married.

I can guess why he did it.
My mother’s hair was the color of yellow apples
And she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas.

I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight.
It is hard for me to imagine that
My parents made love in a roomful of roses
And I wasn’t there.

But now I am. My mother is blushing.
This is the wonderful thing about art.
It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleeping
As it might have late that night
When my father and mother made love above Rothko
Who lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses. "

― Lynn Emanuel ,

8 " The wonderful thing about learning is that you deprive no one else by taking what you learn. The wonderful thing about teaching is that you don’t lose what you give away. Teaching is also the only gift you can give that will live on into eternity. Something you teach becomes another’s who teaches it to another and to another, and on and on and on. "

9 " But that’s the wonderful thing about foreign travel, suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most basic sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross the street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses. "

10 " At their core, Tiger Eyes, Forever..., and Sally J. Freeman are all books about teenage issues, but to an adult reader, the parents' story lines seem to almost overshadow their daughters. I'm bringing an entirely new set of experiences to these novels now, and my reward is a fresh set of story lines that i missed the first time around. I'm sure that in twenty or thirty years I'll read these books again and completely identify with all the grandparent characteristics. That's the wonderful thing about Judy Blume - you can revisit her stories at any stage in life and find a character who strikes a deep chord of recognition. I've been there, I'm in the middle of this, someday that'll be me. The same characters, yet somehow completely different. (Beth Kendrick) "

― Jennifer O'Connell , Everything I Needed to Know about Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume

11 " But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing. "

― Ray Bradbury , Fahrenheit 451

12 " There's always more to the story, Catriona," She replied. " That's the wonderful thing about stories. "

13 " That was the wonderful thing about New York: Years of bad blood could be wiped out with a single gesture of friendliness. "

― Candace Bushnell , Trading Up

14 " For the wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers got angry scolded God were egotistical or testy or impatient in their turns made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven. "

15 " Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field. "