1
" I had another reason for seeking Him, for trying to espy His face, a professional one. God and literature are conflated in my mind. Why this is, I’m not sure. Perhaps because great books seem heavensent. Perhaps because I know that each nove is a puny but very valiant attempt at godlike behavior. Perhaps because there is no difference between the finest poetry and most transcendent mysticism. Perhaps because writers like Thomas Merton, who are able to enter the realm of the spirit and come away with fine, lucid prose. Perhaps because of more secular writers, like John Steinbeck, whose every passage, it seems to me, peals with religiousity and faith. It once occured to me that literature — all art really — is either talking to people about God, or talking to God about people. "
― Paul Quarrington , The Boy on the Back of the Turtle: Seeking God, Quince Marmalade, and the Fabled Albatross on Darwin's Islands
2
" It has been observed of the warring Turks, that often they used this notable deceit - to send a lying rumor and a vain tumult of war to one place, but, in the meanwhile, to address their true forces to another place, that so they might surprise those who have been unwarily led by pernicious credulity. So have we manifest (alas! too, too manifest) reasons to make us conceive, that whilst the chief urgers of the course of conformity are skirmishing with us about the trifling ceremonies (as some men count them), they are but laboring to hold our thoughts so bent and intent upon those smaller quarrels, that we may forget to distinguish between evils immanent and evils imminent, and that we be not too much awake to espy their secret slight in compassing further aims. "
― George Gillespie , A Dispute Against the English Popish Ceremonies Obtruded on the Church of Scotland
3
" Indeed, there is something about reading in a restaurant that is borderline romantic. Leaning back in that corner booth, an evocative title in our hands, a stale cup of java in front of us, every so often bolting forward to jot a phrase onto the napkin, we look like, well, poets-unknown belletrists scraping through the hardscrabble years and awaiting the distinction that is imminent. the waiter of waitress refills our cup, we drop a memorable apothegm or two, share a laugh fraught with meaning, scope out the joint, and return to our tome. Nonbiblioholics strain to espy our title; conversation is struck up on things Kafkaesque and Kierkegaardian; and we forge a genuine biblioholic simpatico with all around. "
― , Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction
