Steve B.

“Now discontent nibbled at him - not painfully, but constantly. Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away - you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch - and your mind says, "Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?" All of these, of course, are the foundation of man's greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. "What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?" And now we're coming to the wicked, poisoned dart: "What have I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth?" And this isn't vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.”
― John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

“human society,” as C. S. Lewis puts it, “inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“What happens when you’ve been following a star, and it leads you to a stable? What happens when all of a sudden, after thinking that something grand and glorious would be at the other end, you end up in the backyard of a barn? And there, instead of a palace and a king on a throne, you find a little baby held by his mother. It’s nothing like what you had anticipated. How do you react when you follow the star and find a stable?”
― Max Lucado, On This Holy Night: The Heart of Christmas

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe