“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

— Joan Didion

Christ’s life is a demand. You don’t want to be reminded of it. So we don’t have to see what happens to the truth. A darker time is coming - when men will be more clever. They won’t fight the truth, they’ll just ignore it. I paint their comfortable Christ, with a halo over his head. How can I show what I haven’t lived? Someday I might have the courage to venture, not yet. Someday I’ll - I’ll paint the true Christ.

— Ohlendorf, The Painter (A Hidden Life, 2019)

The negative ethic forbids certain actions; the positive ethic demands certain actions. To follow the negative ethic is to be decent, to have clean hands. But to follow the positive ethic, to be one’s brother’s keeper, is to be more than decent—it is to be active, even aggressive. If the negative ethic is one of decency, the positive one is the ethic of riskful, strenuous nobility.

— Philip Hallie

Once we grasp the truth that how God saves us is fitted to what we are called to be and to do, we can understand why it is that our salvation is necessarily both gift and charge.

— Chris E. W. Green

Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved.

— Synecdoche, New York (2008) Written and Directed by Charlie Kaufman

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

— William Blake, A Poison Tree