#andkatereads

"It is the experience that Christ and his humanity shares with us: the visionary glimpses of heaven, but also the sense of hellish darkness and depression; the delight in the beauties of nature and the warmth of human friendship, but also the awareness of destruction and corruption in both nature and humanity—"

"Overthinking isn't a personality trait. It's the sneakiest form of fear. It steals time, creativity, and goals." "If you listen to any thought long enough, it becomes part of your personal playlist."

"Please, God Almighty, tell me who You are! I beseech You and only You. Only you can rescue me. At Your feet, I lay down everything I have learned, and I give my entire life to You. Take away what You will, be it my joy, my friends, my family, or even my life. But let me have You, O God."

“When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner, I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar.”

“I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem e vil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.”

“While the splendors that elude us in youth are likely to receive our casual contempt in adolescence and our measured consideration in adulthood, they forever hold us in their thrall.”

“...Fight with yer teeth if you have to, but stay together...trust the Maker and do like your father would have you do. Do like yer ma would have you do. Don’t just follow your heart. Your heart will betray you.” 

“...piety itself has been downgraded to a walk in the garden. It is hard to see how duty can apply to the modern family. Duty impresses a structured hierarchy onto our lives. Duty never says, “you be you,” or “go ah ead and do what makes you happy.” Duty says, “This is who you are; do what is required.” “That little tune that your household sings is in harmony with the music of the spheres, and that harmony restores many things that the enemy has perverted.”

“The otherwise unexplained hysteria of today’s identity politics is nothing more or less than: the collective human howl of our time, sent up by inescapably communal creatures trying desperately to identify their own.”