Transcendent Kingdom Quotes
"Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."
"The funny thing about the phrases that my mom picked up is that she always got them a little wrong."
"If you are living a godly life, a moral life, then everything you do can be a prayer."
"She’d been so free with that information, like she was telling me about a cough she couldn’t kick, but I was enraged, self-righteous."
"The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out."
"I wanted to understand why the feelings and emotions came about, what part of the brain caused them, and, more important, what part of the brain could stop them."
"Could optogenetics be used to identify the neural mechanisms involved in psychiatric illnesses?"
"The memory lingered, the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it."
"That this man, my father, went back to Ghana in such a cowardly way, leaving his two children and wife alone to navigate a difficult country, a punishing state."
"What's the point of all this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?"
"To not think sinfully? To not think about lying or stealing or hitting your brother, was that even possible? Do we have control over our thoughts?"
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."
"My soul is still my soul, even if I rarely call it that."
"We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body."
"If the Bible is the infallible word of God, must we approach it literally?"
"Live long enough and you’ll forget almost everything you thought you’d always remember."
"It embarrassed me to know that I would have been embarrassed to talk about Nana’s addiction with Han."
"We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do."
"Sometimes I tell myself that I made it all up, the feeling of my heart full to bursting, the desire to know God and be known by him, but that is not true either."
"It is the animal that perceives, not parts of its brain, and it is human beings who think and reason, not their brains."
"I knew, even as I was writing that entry, that God didn’t work that way, but then I wondered, how exactly did he work?"
"I wanted to hear her tell me, down to the cent, how much she paid in electricity every month, how much money my life was costing her—me, the child she had never wanted."
"I didn’t want any attention at all, and in those first few weeks I was safe from it."
"If I could have stopped going to the First Assemblies altogether, I would have."
"You are not alone, it says, and that is a comfort, not to the dying, but to those of us who are terrified of being left behind."
"I saw him shoot up only once. On the couch, in the living room of our house, he plunged a needle into the crook of his elbow, and then he slipped away somewhere."
"I have never seen a needle since without thinking of him. I have preferred the flesh of mice to that of humans because I never want to put a needle into an elbow."
"Do you believe in evolution? Of course I believe in evolution."
"My mother went insane when Nana relapsed, and I went quiet."
"Your mother always thought she was better than us, but you see."
"Anhedonia is the psychiatric term for the inability to derive pleasure from things that are normally pleasurable."
"There is no living thing on God's Earth that doesn't come to know pain sometime."
"I understood that the same thing that made humans great was also the thing that hampered the lives of everything around us."
"God is with me; do you hear me? God is with me wherever I go."
"I wanted everything and I wanted to want less."
"I wanted to tell someone about the huge wave of relief I felt every time I watched an addicted mouse refuse the lever."
"You spend more time with lab mice than you do with people. You know that's not healthy, right?"
"Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, 'This is the way; walk in it.'"