Amy Harmon

“True beauty, the kind that doesn’t fade or wash off, takes time. It takes pressure. It takes incredible endurance. It is the slow drip that makes the stalactite, the shaking of the earth that creates mountains, the constant pounding of the waves that break up the rocks and smooths the rough edges. And from the violence, the furor, the raging of the winds, the roaring of the waters, something better emerges, something that would otherwise never exist.And so we endure. We have faith that there is purpose. We hope for things we cant see. We believe that there are lessons in loss, power in love, and that we have within us the potential for a beauty so magnificent that our bodies cant contain it.”

“God wants us to receive everything that life was meant to teach. Then we take what we've learned, and it becomes our offering to God and to mankind. But we have to live in order to learn. And sometimes we have to fight in order to live.”

“But she wasn’t the only one who was suffering, and sometimes there is comfort in the knowledge that you don’t suffer alone, sad as that is.”

“We weren't so different, Finn and I. Cages come in lots of colors and shapes. Some are gilded, while others have a slamming door. But golden handcuffs are still handcuffs.”

“Maybe people had no choice but I wonder sometimes what would have happened if everyone without a choice would have made a choice anyway. If we all chose not to participate. Not to be bullied. Not to take up arms. Not to persecute. What would happen then?”

“What softened your heart?" I asked softly."Good music and a friend."I felt my eyes burn a little and turned from him, blinking quickly to lap up the sting of tears. "Music has incredible power""So does friendship," he supplied frankly.”

“The longer he remained on this earth, the more he was sure that mankind had no clue about God or heaven. Not when they used him as an excuse to kill, to punish, to discriminate.”

“Life had taught her that consequences were ugly and painful, and seldom worth the pleasure they had been bartered for.”

“...There's a lot I don't understand...but not understanding is better not believing" - Ambrose”

“I wondered how he'd learned to push the words away, to drown them, to not feel them pounding against his head and his heart, begging to be spoken.”

“Fear is strange. It settles on chests and seeps through skin, through layers of tissue, muscle, and bone and collects in a soul-sized black hole, sucking the joy out of life, the pleasure, the beauty. But not the hope. Somehow, the hope is the only thing resistant to the fear, and it is that hope that makes the next breath possible, the next step, the next tiny act of rebellion, even if that rebellion is simply staying alive.”

“I don't think we get answers to every question. We don't get all the whys. But I think when we look back to the end of our lives, if we do the best we can, and we will see that the things we begged God to take from us, the things we cursed him for, the things that made us turn our backs on him, are the things that were the biggest blessings, the biggest opportunities for growth.”

“We are at war. War has a way of stripping us of perspective. War is about life and death, and it paints everything in shades of now or never.”

“Why don’t you focus on where you’re going and less on where you came from?”

“He was right that I was afraid. But I didn’t think I was afraid of the truth. I was afraid of believing something that would destroy me if it turned out to be a lie.”

“Often-times, grass was more useful than gold. Man was more desirable than a beast. Chance was more seductive than knowledge, and eternal life was completely meaningless without love.”

“If I didn’t look too closely, I wouldn’t see that Tiras wasn’t there. If I didn’t breathe too deeply, I wouldn’t feel the hollow echo in my empty chest. If I didn’t move too quickly, I wouldn’t reach any painful conclusions. And if I didn’t listen, I wouldn’t hear the silence he always left behind.”

“She wondered how it would feel to be beautiful and have it taken away. How much harder would it be than never knowing what it felt like in the first place?”

“She had almost felt relieved when she was arrested. The thing she had dreaded, feared, run from had happened. When it came, she was strangely liberated from the fear. She couldn't dread what had already come to pass. She didn't have to anticipate the horror when the horror was right there. With her arrest came a certain calm, a quiet comfort. It had come. She had known it would and she could stop fighting.”

“When the ancient Romans would conquer a new place or a new people, they would leave the language and the customs in tact – they would even let the conquered people rule themselves in most cases, appointing a governor to maintain a foothold in the region.” Wilson leaned against the whiteboard as he spoke, his posture relaxed, his hands clasped loosely.“This was part of what made Rome so successful. They didn't try to make everyone Romans in the process of conquering them. When I went to Africa with the Peace Corp, a woman who worked with the Corp said something to me that I have often thought about since. She told me 'Africa is not going to adapt to you. You are going to have to adapt to Africa.' That is true of wherever you go, whether it's school or whether it's in the broader world.”