Walter Wangerin Quotes

God is coming! God is coming! All the element we swim in, this existence, echoes ahead the advent. God is coming! Can't you feel it?

The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can't stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of character into hope--and the hope that has become our joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend up on it) disappoint us.

'Gloria, Gloria!' they cry, for their song embraces all that the Lord has begun this day: Glory to God in the highest of heavens! And peace to the people with whom he is pleased! And who are these people? With whom does the good Lord choose to take his pleasure? The shepherds. The plain and nameless - whose every name the Lord knows well. You. And me.

It is not insignificant that my first apprehension of the love of God was granted in an experience with my father. Nor is it generally uncommon that God is apprehended in experience. Nor, in fact, can the divine and human meeting happen any other way. God is not a God of the pulpit, though the pulpit proclaim him. He is a God in and of the histories of humankind. What is significant is that I should have to say so.

Mirrors that hide nothing hurt me. But this is the hurt of purging and precious renewal - and these are the mirrors of dangerous grace.

I have never loved Fortune, even when she seemed most to love me. I never considered her treasures mine, neither her money, nor her office nor her influence. Her theft of these things, therefore. has taken away nothing of my own. Mother, my roof is the stars. My house is human goodness. My body is clothed. My stomach is full. And the thirstier part of me, my soul, drinks gladly from the pool of my books.So much for me. I am just fine.

So go back to the books. They will comfort you and cheer you. If you earnestly work with them, neither sorrow nor anxiety nor distress nor suffering need trouble your mind any more, no, not evermore.

So here comes Gabriel again, and what he says is "Good tidings of great joy for all people." That's why the shepherds are first: they represent all the nameless, all the working stiffs, the great wheeling population of the whole world.

Fantasy deals with the immeasurable while science-fiction deals with the measurable.

Sorrow spoken lends a little courage to the speaker.

Unless you learn to play a duet in the same key, to the same rhythm, a slow process of disengagement will wedge you apart, first secretly, psychologically, and then openly and miserably.

We never slam the door on flattery, we nudge it shut like a man rejecting his mistress: if she nudges back, we're delighted – and if she breaks it down, we rejoice.

Eugene Peterson's language makes the Bible exciting and strong, sweet, sharp, persuasive, painful, personal, contemporary, kind, and dramatic—and available to every reader of this age.