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“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.”
― Flaubert's Parrot
― Flaubert's Parrot

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.”
― Middlemarch
― Middlemarch

“Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm but artisans, like dumpling makers, if somewhat slower.”
― The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
― The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world.”
― Ethics
― Ethics

“My father was a better bricklayer than I am a theologian. I am still in too much of a hurry. But if the work I have done in theology is of any use, it is because of what I learned on the job, that is, you can lay only one brick at a time.”
― Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir
― Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir
Thomas’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Thomas’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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