People From Pennsylvania

"Life grows short. Have you done everything you wanted to do, or have you played it safe?"

"If indigenous Amazonian tribes were subjects to acid rain, the liberals were emotionally devastated. But if a trailer park of white trash across town all got cancer because they lived atop a toxic dump, it was a joke."

"Racial struggles are never purely racial."

"I can’t appreciate someone else’s history if I’m forced to reject and feel ashamed about mine."

"Even though tax protest is portrayed as extremism, most Americans probably cheat on their tax reports."

"Jesus is dead. Moses is dead. Mohammed is dead. Buddha, deceased. Every one of these know-it-alls has turned to dust. That should be enough commentary on whether they were the final word on anything."

"All the holy scriptures of all the world's major religions are nonsense."

"Crank is to coffee what sexual homicide is to a goodnight kiss."

"Written history, like the missionary position, is an act executed from the top looking down."

"Can you imagine a higher moral calling than to destroy someone’s dreams with one bullet…?"

"[On modern art] True psychos stand alone. The only pioneers are those who give voices to the ugliest corridors of their unconscious without fear of censure from any quarter. The acts that ordinary of people commit behind closed doors are beyond the ken of any performance artist. Humans' innate weirdness is far more threating and entertaining than anything the professional shock mavens could conjure.I boggle your conception of a world split between cognoscenti and squares.I subvert the subversive and bury the underground under six feet of its own hypocritical manure. I perform unsolicited tattooing, body-piercing, and ritual scarification upon you. Give vent to your sickest fantasies, but don't call it art. Cornhole Barbara Bush, but only if you want to. Sketch your astrological chart with your own feces,but only if it feels good. If you want to do something truly radical, kill yourself. We'll have one less reader, but the world will be a better place."

"This is the real thing, brains lying on the ground, and the spectators love it."

"If I cared about what you thought, I'd be writing for National Geographic or something."

"Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent."

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?"

"I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it."

"Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house."

"Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself—like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks."

"If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried potatoes are out."

"The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old."

"The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible."

"Children are different—mentally, physically, spiritually, quantitatively, qualitatively; and furthermore, they're all a little bit nuts."

"I will read anything rather than work."

"If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs, it's just possible that you haven't grasped the situation."

"You can't sleep until noon with the proper élan unless you have some legitimate reason for staying up until three (parties don't count)."

"The most important thing about me is that I am a Catholic. It's a superstructure within which you can work, like a sonnet."

"The golden rule of writing is to write what you care about. If you care about your topic, you'll do your best writing, and then you stand the best chance of really touching a reader in some way."

"Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free."

"God … must always be sought for Himself, never as a means toward something else. Whoever seeks God as a means toward desired ends will not find God. The mighty God, the maker of heaven and earth, will not be one of many treasures, not even the chief of all treasures. He will be all in all or He will be nothing. God will not be used."

"To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men."

"The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be honored but to see his Saviour glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see his Lord promoted and himself neglected. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and overserious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart."

"One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organization do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always."

"What comes to mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us."

"God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which He must work."

"Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are."

"To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart."

"In the long pull we pray only as well as we live."

"The blessed and inviting truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and in our worship of Him we should find unspeakable pleasure."

"When God would make His name known to mankind, He could find no better word than "I AM.""

"We are right when, and only when, we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position."

"In our constant struggle to believe we are likely to overlook the simple fact that a bit of healthy disbelief is sometimes as needful as faith to the welfare of our souls. I would go further and say that we would do well to cultivate a reverent skepticism. It will keep us out of a thousand bogs and quagmires where others who lack it sometimes find themselves. It is no sin to doubt some things, but it may be fatal to believe everything. Faith is at the root of all true worship, and without faith it is impossible to please God. Through unbelief Israel failed to inherit the promises. “By grace are ye saved through faith.” “The just shall live by faith.” Such verses as these come trooping to our memories, and we wince just a little at the suggestion that unbelief may also be a good and useful thing. … Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything. Faith engages the person and promises of God and rests upon them with perfect assurance. Whatever has behind it the character and word of the living God is accepted by faith as the last and final truth from which there must never be any appeal. Faith never asks questions when it has been established that God has spoken. 'Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar' (Rom. 3:4). Thus faith honors God by counting Him righteous and accepts His testimony against the very evidence of its own senses. That is faith, and of such we can never have too much. Credulity, on the other hand, never honors God, for it shows as great a readiness to believe anybody as to believe God Himself. The credulous person will accept anything as long as it is unusual, and the more unusual it is the more ardently he will believe. Any testimony will be swallowed with a straight face if it only has about it some element of the eerie, the preternatural, the unearthly."

"Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications. We arrange things so that we can get on well enough without divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly seeking it."

"We have become so engrossed in the work of the Lord that we have forgotten the Lord of the work."

"I find that many men and women are troubled by the thought that they are too small and inconsequential in the scheme of things. But that is not our real trouble—we are actually too big and too complex, for God made us in His image and we are too big to be satisfied with what the world offers us! … Man is bored, because he is too big to be happy with that which sin is giving him. God has made him too great, his potential is too mighty."

"Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul."

"Truth is a glorious but hard mistress. She never consults, bargains or compromises."

"We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone."

"Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again. … The thoughtful soul to solitude retires," said the poet of other and quieter times; but where is the solitude to which we can retire today? Science, which has provided men with certain material comforts, has robbed them of their souls by surrounding them with a world hostile to their existence."

"The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of Christians. They are facing Christ and the world. ...The ‘worship’ growing out of such a view of life is as far off center as the view itself—a sort of sanctified nightclub without the champagne and the dressed-up drunks.""

"Whatever else it embraces, true Christian experience must always include a genuine encounter with God. Without this, religion is but a shadow, a reflection of reality, a cheap copy of an original once enjoyed by someone else of whom we have heard. It cannot but be a major tragedy in the life of any man to live in a church from childhood to old age and know nothing more real than some synthetic god compounded of theology and logic, but having no eyes to see, no ears to hear, and no heart to love."