shanghao

“Love can be so strange and sad. It can be hard to understand why we run toward certain people and away from others at different times in our lives. Why we search so hard for that thing we are looking for, and then run so fast when we find it.”
― Stephanie Perkins, Summer Days and Summer Nights: Twelve Love Stories

“First, if we don’t see Him—if we lack His manifest presence—we can’t know Him intimately. We can only know about Him, not unlike my relationship with United States presidents. Or worse, we deceive ourselves by creating a fictional Jesus. This illusion is most dangerous because we believe we know Someone we don’t. James tells us, “But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves” (James 1: 22). One who is fooled believes they know someone or something, but in reality, they don’t.”
― John Paul Bevere, The Awe of God: The Astounding Way a Healthy Fear of God Transforms Your Life

“Great and brilliant men and women, whose usual conversations were in the realm of ideas, would normally shun gossip or sporting events or even crime–except in the abstract–as topics for an evening’s discourse. But give them a murder–not a commonplace death in a public house brawl, nor a shooting in a robbery, nor a sordid killing in a fit of jealousy, nor an even more sordid sex crime, but an inexplicable death surrounded by mystery–give them a nice, juicy, puzzle of murder, and lo! they can speak of nothing else.”
― Randall Garrett, Lord Darcy

“Cultural connections? Where did you learn that? In your metropolitan police cultural classes? He was an Indian Muslim. I’m a Chinese bastard. Apart from eating satay, I’ve probably got more in common with you than him. And we’ve got nothing in common.”
― Neil Humphreys, Bloody Foreigners