Sundays Are For Lovers Quotes

Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportian suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lovers's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favourite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death. How would that be? Just how would that be?

Resolution. Musicians know all about that, don’t they? Pieces of music seek resolution, have to end on a particular note, or it sounds all wrong. The same applies to our lives. It’s exactly the same.

There were two classes of persons upon whom a duty of virtually absolute confidentiality rested: doctors and lovers.

Adding to my emotional dizziness on Sunday, I spoke with my sister, who kept noting how amazing Michael is, and what a brave and selfless man he is for having helped as he did.

the toilet is an intimacy only shared with parents when you are young and once again when they are older and with lovers when say on a Sunday morning stretching into the bathroom you wake to the sound of stream into bowl and go to hug the naked body stood with its back to you and kiss the neck and taste the whole of the night on there and smell the morning’s pale yellow loss and take the whole of him in your hand and feel the water moving through him and knowing that this is love the prone flesh what we expel from the body and what we let inside

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.

Pop said life was like learning to drive. You were bound to fuck up, make mistakes, maybe even cause an accident, but if you practice and follow the rules, people didn’t have to get hurt—and one day you’d just get better at it. Just don’t . . . give it up, he said.

How necessary Sundays have become. I reach for them like sleeping lovers on the other side of my earth or my mattress.

For weeks Octavio returned to the shelter of the trees. The woman would appear as the sun reached midday. She would walk to the edge of the trees, find her chair and drag it to the boat pond. Every Sunday the same chair, the same spot. Every Sunday a book. He needed only one word to imagine a hundred stories: she - was a dancer; cooling her feet after a morning of twists and leaps. was the daughter of a sea captain, remembering her childhood as the toy boats crossed the pond. was an empress hiding among her subjects, shielding her face with a scarf made from the silk of ten thousand worms. Five thousand green, five thousand blue. was a teacher, a lover of learning, patient and gentle with her students. She - was a reader. He had a library.

A half-open window. Morning-fresh air carries curious sunlight into a bedroom. Flecks of dust shimmer yellow-gold. Four feet, entwined under white sheets. Joni's Blue, on the player. Delicate curtains slow-dance to Sunday's tune. Laughter. Talk of: what for breakfast? Anything. Anything at all.

Some of the dairy people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed; noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her contented pauses, the occassional laugh upon which her soul seemed to ride - the laugh of a woman in company with the man she loves and has won from all other women - unlike anything else in nature. They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a bird which has not yet alighted.

It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits...Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.

Children raised in a couple-centered home more fully understand the gospel of Jesus Christ. God’s love manifested in marriage speaks more to kids than any Sunday school lesson or sermon. This truth is the essence of Ephesians 5:25. Marriage is used as a word picture for God’s love for the church. What is your marriage teaching your kids about Jesus?

People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary’s mother had accepted him as her son’s lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she’d barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she’d hunted through her son’s drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists. “…And yet,” he whispered, “The janitor at school--remember him? Mr. Feeney? --he’d openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers…” What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions--the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he’d become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks. I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both--Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with the surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me. “The irony,” he said, “… is that now that I’m this blind man, it’s clearer to me than it’s ever been before. What’s the line? ‘Was blind but now I see…’” He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. “You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought…said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed up phone message… That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I’m fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness--That’s what makes me sad. Everyone’s so scared to be happy.” “I know what you mean,” I said. His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. “No you don’t,” he said. “You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you’re afraid.” “I’m not afraid. It’s more like…” I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened. “I’ll give you what I learned from all this,” he said. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

God, it's hot up here Well, there are worse things Than staring at the water on a Sunday There are worse things Than staring at the water As you're posing for a picture Being painted by your lover In the middle of the summer On an island in the river on a Sunday

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property

What is beauty, she thought, but the promise of happiness, as Stendhal said it was?

To realize the value of one hour, ask lovers who are waiting to meet

Discipline creates ways for the lovers of it.

She’s soft-hearted, like a woman. She pays the dockworkers too much and the investors too little. She gives the workers Sundays and holidays off—she even gives them a break for lunch!

It's worth getting out of bed some mornings. And it's a pleasure, especially if the pale winter sun is out and shining, to delight with your lover in the urban gift of your favorite café. Fresh coffee, steaming croissants, and the Sunday papers. Ah! All the way to ours, Alice and I talked about love and how many people don't get any while others get a lot, and how that unfairness probably accounts for the federal deficit and crooked contracting practices, and so on.

And the difference was this, she mused: those who are twenty don’t know what it is like to be forty, whereas those who are forty know what it is like to be twenty. It was a bit like discussing a foreign country with somebody who has never been there. They are prepared to listen, but it’s not quite real for them.

You seem disappointed that I am not more responsive to your interest in "spiritual direction". Actually, I am more than a little ambivalent about the term, particularly in the ways it is being used so loosely without any sense of knowledge of the church's traditions in these matters. If by spiritual direction you mean entering into a friendship with another person in which an awareness and responsiveness to God's Spirit in the everydayness of your life is cultivated, fine. Then why call in an awkward term like "spiritual direction"? Why not just "friend"? Spiritual direction strikes me as pretentious in these circumstances, as if there were some expertise that can be acquired more or less on its own and then dispensed on demand. The other reason for my lack of enthusiasm is my well-founded fear of professionalism in any and all matters of the Christian life. Or maybe the right label for my fear is "functionalism". The moment an aspect of Christian living (human life, for that matter) is defined as a role, it is distorted, debased - and eventually destroyed. We are brothers and sisters with one another, friends and lovers, saints and sinners. The irony here is that the rise of interest in spiritual direction almost certainly comes from the proliferation of role-defined activism in our culture. We are sick and tired of being slotted into a function and then manipulated with Scripture and prayer to do what someone has decided (often with the help of some psychological testing) that we should be doing to bring glory to some religious enterprise or other. And so when people begin to show up who are interested in us just as we are - our souls - we are ready to be paid attention to in this prayerful, listening, non-manipulative, nonfunctional way. Spiritual direction. But then it begins to develop a culture and language and hierarchy all its own. It becomes first a special interest, and then a specialization. That is what seems to be happening in the circles you are frequenting. I seriously doubt that it is a healthy (holy) line to be pursuing. Instead, why don't you look over the congregation on Sundays and pick someone who appears to be mature and congenial. Ask her or him if you can meet together every month or so - you feel the need to talk about your life in the company of someone who believes that Jesus is present and active in everything you are doing. Reassure the person that he or she doesn't have to say anything "wise". You only want them to be there for you to listen and be prayerful in the listening. After three or four such meetings, write to me what has transpired, and we'll discuss it further. I've had a number of men and women who have served me in this way over the years - none carried the title "spiritual director", although that is what they have been. Some had never heard of such a term. When I moved to Canada a few years ago and had to leave a long-term relationship of this sort, I looked around for someone whom I could be with in this way. I picked a man whom I knew to be a person of integrity and prayer, with seasoned Christian wisdom in his bones. I anticipated that he would disqualify himself. So I pre-composed my rebuttal: "All I want you to do is two things: show up and shut up. Can you do that? Meet with me every six weeks or so, and just be there - an honest, prayerful presence with no responsibility to be anything other than what you have become in your obedient lifetime." And it worked. If that is what you mean by "spiritual director," okay. But I still prefer "friend". You can see now from my comments that my gut feeling is that the most mature and reliable Christian guidance and understanding comes out of the most immediate and local of settings. The ordinary way. We have to break this cultural habit of sending out for an expert every time we feel we need some assistance. Wisdom is not a matter of expertise. The peace of the Lord, Eugene

Timeless Days without rhythm Without bottom or top In the arms of my lover Time seems to stop. Days become months Which flow into years Love’s hourglass measures Just two kinds of tears. The first kind is cheery, It sweetens the cheek; The other burns bleary It’s black and it’s bleak. This Sunday or Friday, I’m not quite sure when, I’m going to turn thirty, Or twenty, or ten? It’ll be my love’s birthday Or was it just mine? I doesn’t much matter There’s plenty of wine. Should she go to heaven, I dread to know when, I’ll count every second Till we meet again.

I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and willful, she is clement and loving. Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday's child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when i am away from her, and she loves me. She is a prospectus that can never be entirely cataloged, an almanac for Poor Richard. And I'll love her til I die.

...,for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject?

,...for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject?

Jon Kabat-Zinn You know, if you miss the look in your child’s eye one day, you’ve missed it. If you missed the look in your lover’s eyes the next day, you’ve missed that. If you miss the beauty of sitting under trees, well, you’ve missed that. If you sum that over many moments, many years, you may wind up missing the most beautiful aspects of your own life. Who are you going to blame for that? I was too busy? Well, who was too busy? Who tells oneself, “I don’t have any time,” when all you’ve got is time? All you’ve got is this moment. And we might as well take it while we’re alive, because sooner or later, we’re going to be dead. So the perfect moment is this one.

Here is how I propose to end book-banning in this country once and for all: Every candidate for school committee should be hooked up to a lie detector and asked this question: “Have you read a book from start to finish since high school?” or “Did you even read a book from start to finish in high school?” If the truthful answer is “no,” then the candidate should be told politely that he cannot get on the school committee and blow off his big bazoo about how books make children crazy. Whenever ideas are squashed in this country, literate lovers of the American experiment write careful and intricate explanations of why all ideas must be allowed to live. It is time for them to realize that they are attempting to explain America at its bravest and most optimistic to orangutans. From now on, I intend to limit my discourse with dimwitted Savonarolas to this advice: "Have somebody read the First Amendment to the United States Constitution out loud to you, you God damned fool!" Well--the American Civil Liberties Union or somebody like that will come to the scene of trouble, as they always do. They will explain what is in the Constitution, and to whom it applies. They will win. And there will be millions who are bewildered and heartbroken by the legal victory, who think some things should never be said--especially about religion. They are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hi ho.

Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover’s eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child’s Sunday, lost voices, one’s favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. — Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (Vintage International, 2012)

Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject?

That this exceptionally scholarly man whose judgments, always rich and sensitive, though sometimes austere, should have embarked on an intensely romantic retelling of the old Cornish legend of that famous pair of tragic lovers, Tristan and Queen Iseult, is intriguing in itself. But what makes it even more fascinating is that Daphne du Maurier, asked by “Q” ’s daughter long after her father’s death to finish this novel that he had set aside “near the end of a chapter, halfway through,” did so in such a skillful fashion that it is impossible to guess with any certainty the exact point at which she began to write. She says, in a modest foreword, that she “could not imitate ‘Q’’s style… that would have been robbing the dead,” but she had known him when she was a child, remembered him as a genial host at many a Sunday supper, and “by thinking back to conversations long forgotten” she could recapture something of the man himself and trust herself to “fall into his mood.

William was only one year old, and his mother was proud of him, he was so pretty... He was a joy to her, the twining wisps of hair clustering round his head. Mrs Morel lay listening, one Sunday morning, to the chatter of the two. Then she dozed off. When she came downstairs... seated in his armchair, against the chimney piece, sat Morel, rather timid: and standing between his legs, the child - cropped like a sheep, with such an odd round poll - looking wondering at her: and on a newspaper spread out upon the hearth rug, a myriad of crescent-shaped curls, like the petals of a marigold scattered in the reddening firelight. Mrs Morel stood still. It was her first baby. She went very white, and was unable to speak. "What dost think on 'im?" Morel laughed uneasily. She gripped her two fists, lifted them, and came forward. Morel shrank back... Her lip trembled, her face broke, and, snatching up the child, she buried her face in his shoulder and cried painfully. She was one of those women who cannot cry: whom it hurts as it hurts a man. It was like the ripping something out of her, her sobbing... She went about her work with closed mouth and very quiet... She spoke to him civilly, and never alluded to what he had done. But he felt something final had happened. ...But she knew, and Morel knew, that that act had caused something momentous to take place in her soul. She remembered that scene all her life, as one in which she had suffered the most intensely. This act of masculine clumsiness was a spear through the side of her love for Morel.

Religious people, the “people of God,” the people of the impossible, impassioned by a love that leaves them restless and unhinged, panting like the deer for running streams, as the psalmist says (Ps. 42:1), are impossible people. In every sense of the word. If, on any given day, you go into the worst neighborhoods of the inner cities of most large urban centers, the people you will find there serving the poor and needy, expending their lives and considerable talents attending to the least among us, will almost certainly be religious people — evangelicals and Pentecostalists, social workers with deeply held religious convictions, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic, men and women, priests and nuns, black and white. They are the better angels of our nature. They are down in the trenches, out on the streets, serving the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, while the critics of religion are sleeping in on Sunday mornings. That is because religious people are lovers; they love God, with whom all things are possible. They are hyper-realists, in love with the impossible, and they will not rest until the impossible happens, which is impossible, so they get very little rest. The philosophers, on the other hand, happen to be away that weekend, staying in a nice hotel, reading unreadable papers on “the other” at each other, which they pass off as their way of serving the wretched of the earth. Then, after proclaiming the death of God, they jet back to their tenured jobs, unless they happen to be on sabbatical leave and are spending the year in Paris.

Do you think we love each other enough to marry?" he asked, definitely. It made her tremble. "No," she answered, truthfully. "I don't think so - we're too young." "I thought perhaps," he went on miserably, "that you, with your intensity in things, might have given more - than I could ever make up to you. - And even now - if you think it better - we'll be engaged." Now Miriam wanted to cry. And she was angry too. He was always such a child, for people to do as they liked with. "No, I don't think so," she said firmly. He pondered a minute. "You see," he said, "with me - I don't think one person would ever monopolise me - be everything to me - I think never." This she did not consider... "You stop away, will you?" She did not answer. By this time she was very angry. "Well, what shall we do?" she said shortly. "I suppose I'd better drop French. I was just beginning to get on with it. - But I suppose I can go alone." "I don't see that we need," he said. "I can give you a French lesson, surely." "Well - and there are Sunday nights. I shan't stop coming to chapel, because I enjoy it, and it's all the social life I get. But you've no need to come home with me. I can go alone." "All right," he answered, rather taken aback... "And you won't think about it, and let it trouble you, will you?" he asked. "Oh no," replied Miriam, without looking at him. He was silent. She thought him unstable. He had no fixity of purpose, no anchor of righteousness that held him. "Because," he continued, "a man gets across his bicycle - and goes to work - and does all sorts of things. But a woman broods." "No, I shan't bother," said Miriam. And she meant it.

went to her workshop three times a week to paint with Kirsten. She rarely frequented the Lark House dining room, preferring to eat out at local restaurants where the owners knew her, or in her apartment, when her daughter-in-law sent the chauffeur around with one of her favorite dishes. Irina kept only basic necessities in her kitchen: fresh fruit, oatmeal, whole-grain bread, honey. Alma and Seth often invited Irina to their ritual Sunday lunch at Sea Cliff, where the family paid the matriarch homage. To Seth, who had previously used any pretext not to arrive before dessert—for even he was unable to consider not putting in an appearance at all—Irina’s presence made the occasion infinitely more appealing. He was still stubbornly pursuing her, but since he was meeting with little success he also went out with previous girlfriends willing to put up with his fickleness. He was bored with them and did not succeed in making Irina jealous. As his grandmother often said and the family often repeated, why waste ammunition on vultures? It was yet another enigmatic saying often used by the Belascos. To Alma, these family reunions began with a pleasant sense of anticipation at seeing her loved ones, particularly her granddaughter, Pauline (she saw Seth frequently enough), but often ended up being a bore, since every topic of conversation became a pretext for getting angry, not from any lack of affection, but out of the bad habit of arguing over trivialities. Seth always looked for ways to challenge or scandalize his parents; Pauline brought to the table yet another cause she had embraced, which she explained in great detail, from genital mutilation to animal slaughterhouses; Doris took great pains to offer her most exquisite culinary experiments, which were veritable banquets, yet regularly ended up weeping in her room because nobody appreciated them; good old Larry meanwhile performed a constant balancing act to avoid quarrels. The grandmother took advantage of Irina to dissipate tension, because the Belascos always behaved in a civilized fashion in front of strangers, even if it was only a humble employee from

No respecter of evidence has ever found the least clue as to what life is all about, and what people should do with it. Oh, there have been lots of brilliant guesses. But honest, educated people have to identify with them as such--as guesses. What are guesses worth? Scientifically and legally, they are not worth doodley-squat. As the saying goes: “Your guess is as good as mine.” The guesses we like best, as with so many things we like best, were taught to us in childhood--by people who loved us and wished us well. We are reluctant to criticize those guesses. It is an ultimate act of rudeness to find fault with anything which is given to us in a spirit of love. So a modern, secular education is often painful. By its very nature, it invites us to question the wisdom of the ones we love. Too bad. I have said that one guess is as good as another, but that is only roughly so. Some guesses are crueler than others--which is to say, harder on human beings, and on other animals as well. The belief that God wants heretics burned to death is a case in point. Some guesses are more suicidal than others. The belief that a true lover of God is immune to the bites of copperheads and rattlesnakes is a case in point. Some guesses are greedier and more egocentric than others. Belief in the divine right of kings and presidents is a case in point. Those are all discredited guesses. But it is reasonable to suppose that other bad guesses are poisoning our lives today. A good education in skepticism can help us to discover those bad guesses, and to destroy them with mockery and contempt. Most of them were made by honest, decent people who had no way of knowing what we know, or what we can find out, if we want to. We have one hell of a lot of good information about our bodies, about our planet, and the universe--about our past. We don’t have to guess as much as the old folks did. Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, “Sir, you did not give us enough information.” I would add to that, “All the same, Sir, I’m not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the end there, anyway, we had tons of information.

In our Christian walk we are encouraged not to remain like babes and children, but to wean ourselves from spiritual milk and soft food and grow into healthier foods. God wants us to exhibit signs of maturity, and many times this comes through very difficult life situations. My experience validates that we grow through difficulties and not through just the good times. If we are not mature, the reason is observable: We have not been workers but idlers in our study of the Bible. Those who are just "Sunday Christians" will never grow to maturity-it takes the study of the Scriptures to become meat-eaters of God's Word. We must be workers in the Scriptures. Paul told Timothy, "Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman... accurately handling the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15). We must roll up our sleeves and do the job ourselves instead of expecting a pastor or teacher to do it for us. PRAYER Father God, thank You for inspiring men of old to write Your Scriptures. They have become my Scriptures; they have become my salvation. Without the knowledge of Scripture my life would be tossed about like the waves in the wind. Thank You for my stability. Amen. HEART ACTION Discover God's strength and comfort by reading His Word each day. Single out a phrase or even a word that really speaks to your heart and carry that with you during your day.

Don’t you move now, lover,” Sunday

One day when I went up there to work, sleepiness overcame me and I lay down on the floor behind the back pew to take a nap. Waking or sleeping (I couldn’t tell which), I saw all the people gathered there who had ever been there. I saw them as I had seen them from the back pew, where I sat with Uncle Othy (who would not come in any farther) while Aunt Cordie sang in the choir, and I saw them as I had seen them (from the back pew) on the Sunday before. I saw them in all the times past and to come, all somehow there in their own time and in all time and in no time: the cheerfully working and singing women, the men quiet or reluctant or shy, the weary, the troubled in spirit, the sick, the lame, the desperate, the dying, the little children tucked into the pews beside their elders, the young married couples full of visions, the old men with their dreams, the parents proud of their children, the grandparents with tears in their eyes, the pairs of young lovers attentive only to each other on the edge of the world, the grieving widows and widowers, the mothers and fathers of children newly dead, the proud, the humble, the attentive, the distracted—I saw them all. I saw the creases crisscrossed on the backs of the men’s necks, their work-thickened hands, the Sunday dresses faded with washing. They were just there. They said nothing, and I said nothing. I seemed to love them all with a love that was mine merely because it included me. When I came to myself again, my face was wet with tears.

However, on this day, things were already out of whack by 10 A.M., and it was all Peter Reynolds’s fault. For the first time in her life Nina had a family obligation, and she wasn’t entirely sure she liked it. Peter had texted her at nine, an hour he said was the earliest acceptable time to contact someone on a Sunday. Nina had still been asleep. Somewhat acerbically, she suggested he recalibrate and set her earliest acceptable time to eleven. “No,” said her nephew, “if I make an exception for you, I’ll need to customize my entire system, and that won’t work at all.” “You have a system?” “Of course. There is a standard weekday wake-up time, and a different weekend time. There is a time in the evening after which one cannot call anyone except good friends or lovers, and a time after which one can only call if there is an emergency.” Nina’s phone was lying on her pillow, on speaker. “I assume there’s a booty call exception to that rule.

appreciated his words. And gave him some of my own. No

The Sad Boy Ay, his old mother was a glad one. And his poor old father was a mad one. The two begot this sad one. Alas for the single shoe The Sad Boy pulled out of the rank green pond, Fishing for fairies On the prankish advice Of two disagreeable lovers of small boys. Pity the unfortunate Sad Boy With a single magic shoe And a pair of feet And an extra foot With no shoe for it. This was how the terrible hopping began That wore the Sad Boy thin and through To his only shoe And started the great fright in the provinces above Brent Where the Sad Boy became half of himself To match the beautiful boot He had dripped from the green pond. Wherever he went weeping and hopping And stamping and sobbing, Pounding a whole earth into a half-heaven, Things split where he stood Into the left side for the left magic, Into no side for the missing right boot. Mercy be to the Sad Boy Scamping exasperated After a wide boot To double the magic Of a limping foot. Mercy to the melancholy folk On the Sad Boy's right. It was not for want of wandering He lost the left boot too And the knowledge of his left side, But because one awful Sunday This dear boy dislimbed Went back to the old pond To fish up another shoe And was quickly (being too light for his line) Fished in. Gracious how he kicks now All the little ripples up! The quiet population of Brent has settled down, And the perfect surface of the famous pond Is slightly pocked, marked with three signs, For visitors come to fish for souvenirs, Where the Sad Boy went in And his glad mother and his mad father after him.

Prayer is pouring your heart to the one you love.

The joy of Loretta’s homecoming was overshadowed by Henry’s rage. Friends with a murderin’ savage, was she? A Comanche slut, that’s what, kissin’ on him in broad daylight, comin’ home to shame them all with her Injun horse and heathen necklace. His land looked like a bloomin’ pincushion with all them heathen lances pokin’ up. He was gonna get shut of ’em, just like he had those horses. Half of ’em stole from white folks! Some trade that was! Loretta listened to his tirade in stony silence. When he wound down she said, “Are you quite finished?” “No, I ain’t!” He leveled a finger at her. “Just you understand this, young lady. If that bastard planted his seed in that belly of yours, it’ll be hell to pay. The second you throw an Injun brat, I’ll bash its head on a rock!” Loretta flinched. “And we call them animals?” Henry backhanded her, catching her on the cheek with stunning force. Loretta reeled and grabbed the table to keep from falling. Rachel screamed and threw herself between them. Amy’s muffled sobs could be heard coming up through the floor. “For the love of God, Henry, please…” Rachel wrung her hands in her apron. “Get a hold on your temper.” Henry swept Rachel aside. Leveling a finger at Loretta again, he snarled, “Don’t you sass me, girl, or I’ll tan your hide till next Sunday. You’ll show respect, by gawd.” Loretta pressed her fingers to her jaw, staring at him. Respect? Suddenly it struck her as hysterically funny. She had been captured by savages and dragged halfway across Texas. Never once, not even when he had just cause, had Hunter hit her with enough force to hurt her, and never in the face. She’d had to come home to receive that kind of abuse. She sank onto the planked bench and started to laugh, a high-pitched, half-mad laughter. Aunt Rachel crossed herself, and that only made her laugh harder. Henry stormed outside to get “those dad-blamed Indian lances” pulled up before a passing neighbor spied them and started calling them Injun lovers. Loretta laughed harder yet. Maybe she had gone mad. Stark, raving mad.

It's worth getting out of bed some mornings. And it's a pleasure, especially if the pale winter sun is out and shining, to delight with your lover in the urban gift of your favorite café. Fresh coffee, steaming croissants, and the Sunday papers. Ah! All the way to ours, Alice and I talked about love and how many people don't get any while others get a lot, and how that unfairness probably accounts for the federal deficit and crooked contracting practices, and so on.

thought,

The priest and his desires Not alone, but a lonely monastery priest, Resisting hard not to venture out and pursue the need for love and passion driven heist, Bound by his sanctum and religion, He tries not to give in to any seduction, Adam and Eve blamed the devil, The priest is baffled to decide who shall he blame for this evil, He rolls and turns restlessly in the bed of his desires, And every night after the Church service he deals with these raging fires, He is dressed in his black robe on the much anticipated Sunday mass, But he is distracted and sees passions and desires cast on peoples faces and even on mosaic glass, At the end of the service he serves all some fine and red wine, And when he stands face to face with a beautiful woman his inner self says “I wish you were mine!’” His Sunday night is spent in her curled hair locks, He is shackled to her beautiful face and desires that fasten around him like unbreakable locks, He often touches his cross that he wears always, Still his nights are restless and now it is so even during the sunny Spring days, He bows before the Altar and makes a solemn confession, “My Lord! her face and her overpowering beauty have become my obsession, Am I still worthy of worshipping you my God? For I have silently started worshiping this feeling of loving her and I do not feel odd, It is her thoughts that possess me even during my sermons, In her absence, not yours My Lord, everything presents itself like bad omens, To tame my wandering thoughts I refer to the Holy Book, But through it too peeps her face and her mesmerising look, I wonder if I shall quit clergy, And adopt this new synergy, I am drowning farther and farther in this mental eclipse, And I only want to think of her beautiful face, her warm skin and her red lips, Shall I forsake my black robe, My Lord, and not Thee? Or Forsake her and thereby my black robe and Thee? Because without her I do not feel anything that is a part of me, And without being me, how can I anything else be, Perhaps I am supposed to be a man of God but not a man, Never to fulfillmy own desires for I am busy fulfilling Your plan, So let me live with my state and the social taboo, While every night I place my desires in the coffin along with the happy morning cuckoo.” The Lord smiles at him, “It is your personal battle and it is grim, You desire her, her face, her charming ways, You think of her during nights and during the bountiful days, But you think of me too and that is enough for me to know, So seek her and kiss her grace, for then you shall better baptise in my glow, And before you fall too low, Rise to your calling and you shall reap as you shall sow, Whether you wear a black robe or her kisses, I shall judge you on how you made others feel with or without your kisses.” Said the Lord in His emphatic voice, And the priest stood up and made the right choice! To love the woman he loved and missed, And he felt something divine within him, whenever her deep beauty he kissed! Source of inspiration : The Thorn Birds 1983 Drama

The priest and his desires Not alone, but a lonely monastery priest, Resisting hard not to venture out and pursue the need for love and passion driven heist, Bound by his sanctum and religion, He tries hard not to give in to any form of seduction, Adam and Eve blamed the devil, The priest is baffled to decide who shall he blame for this evil? He rolls and turns restlessly in the bed of his desires, And every night after the Church service he deals with these raging fires, He is dressed in his black robe on the much anticipated Sunday mass, But he is distracted when he sees passions and desires cast on peoples faces and even on mosaic glass, At the end of the service he serves all some fine and red wine, And when he comes face to face with a beautiful woman, his inner self says “I wish you were mine!’” His Sunday night is spent in her curled hair locks, He is shackled to her beautiful face and desires that fasten around him like unbreakable locks, He often touches his cross that he wears always, Still his nights are restless and now it is so even during the sunny Spring days, He bows before the Altar and makes a solemn confession, “My Lord! her face and her overpowering beauty have become my obsession, Am I still worthy of worshipping you my God? For I have silently started worshiping this feeling of loving her and I do not feel odd, It is her thoughts that possess me even during my sermons, In her absence, not yours My Lord, everything presents itself like bad omens, To tame my wandering thoughts I refer to the Holy Book, But through it too peeps her face and her mesmerising look, I wonder if I shall quit clergy, And adopt this new synergy? I am drowning farther and farther in this mental eclipse, And I only want to think of her beautiful face, her warm skin and her red lips, Shall I forsake my black robe, My Lord, and not Thee? Or Forsake her and thereby my black robe and as well Thee? Because without her I do not feel anything that is a part of me, And without being me, how can I anything else be, Perhaps I am supposed to be a man of God but not a man, Never to fulfil my own desires for I am busy fulfilling Your plan, So let me live with my state and the social taboo, While every night I place my desires in the coffin along with the happy morning cuckoo.” The Lord smiles at him, “It is your personal battle and it is grim, You desire her, her face, her charming ways, You think of her during nights and during the bountiful days, But you think of me too and that is enough for me to know, So seek her and kiss her grace, for then you shall better baptise in my glow, And before you fall too low, Rise to your calling and you shall reap as you shall sow, Whether you wear a black robe or her kisses, I shall judge you on how you made others feel with or without your kisses.” Said the Lord in His emphatic voice, And the priest stood up and made the right choice! To love the woman he loved and missed, And he felt something divine within him, whenever her deep beauty he kissed! Source of inspiration : The Thorn Birds . 1983 Drama

I think people come to words much as lovers get together. They stumble onto each other, at the oddest of times, in the strangest of places. They will meet in an empty laundromat on a rainy Sunday afternoon, or they will catch each other’s eyes across a ballroom dance floor in the middle of a wedding waltz. They will meet without appointment and strike up a relationship without an agenda. There may be a long courtship or a whirlwind romance. There may be protracted avoidance, even what looks like a phobia, as in Karl’s case, or there may be an instant avidity, what amounts to love at first sight. Some carry on a kind of epistolary relationship with words, expressing their feelings through the formal prose of elegant notes, while others jump at words and bark them out at the world in the immediate poetry of certain street-corner vendors. Some slap their words up on posters on telephone poles, while others keep them in reserve, like a pistol concealed in a pocketbook. Some read haltingly, like the nervous lover, hat in hand, while others seem born to orate. We all woo language differently, and language grants us her favors in different ways. Sometimes the relationship takes off, although it is rare there is a ride without bumps. While utterly beautiful, endlessly varied, and thoroughly transfixing, language can also be frustrating, confusing, exasperating, and unforgiving.

He (Becker) then shows how a rather agreeable amorality has gained ground among our peasants, because they'd rather pursue their actual interests than the commandments of morality. Because the revolutionary priests and schoolmasters serve the hu man being, they cut off the head of human beings. The revolutionary laymen or the profane ones had no more inhibitions about cutting off heads, but were less concerned about human rights, i.e., the rights of man, than about their own. How does it come about, though, that the egoism of those who assert a personal interest, and inquire of it all the time, still always succumbs to a priestly or schoolmasterly, i.e., an ideal interest ? Their person seems to them too small, too insignificant, and in fact it is, to lay claim to everything and to be able to completely carry it through. There's a sure sign of this in the fact that they divide themselves into two persons, one eternal and one temporal, and every time care either only for the one or only for the other, on Sunday for the eternal, on the workday for the temporal, in prayer for the former, in work for the latter. They have the priest within themselves, and therefore don't get rid of him, and hear themselves getting a tongue-lashing inwardly every Sunday. How people have struggled and calculated to determine these dualistic essences ! Idea followed upon idea, principle upon principle, system upon system, and none were able to hold down the contradiction of the "worldly" person, the so-called "egoist;' for long. Doesn't this prove that all those ideas were too powerless to take up my whole will into themselves and satisfy it ? They were and remained hostile to me, even if the hostility lay concealed for a long time. Will it be like this with ownness? Is it also just an attempt at mediation ? Every principle to which I turned, such as to reason, I always had to turn away from again. Or can I always be rational, setting everything up in my life according to reason ? I can certainly strive for rationality, I can love it, just as I can also love God and every other idea. I can be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, as I love God. But what I love, what I strive for, is only in my idea, my conception, my thoughts; it is in my heart, in my head, it is in me like the heart, but it is not I, I am not it.

It's Sunday, which for you is a whale's throat. Blue-black and forever.

If you want to know the value of an hour ask new love birds (lovers) that are waiting for each other at different bus stations.

Some people are only around for just a little bit and others longer. It comes down to attitude and acceptance of those changes if you want to continue to grow together—shit,

Rancorous ivy. On the other side of the wall, at the edge of the river, the sand burned. The river lay afire. Kingfishers fell like spots across the eyes and laughter was yellow. Every Sunday Omensetter strolled by the river with his wife, his daughters, and his dog. They came by wagon, spoke to people who were off to church, and while Furber preached, they sprawled in the gravel and trailed their feet in the water. Lucy Omensetter lay her swollen body on a flat rock. Furber felt the sun lapping at her ears. It was like a rising blush, and his hands trembled when he held them out to make the bars of the cross. May the Lord bless you and keep you . . . He closed his eyes, drifting off. They would see how moved he was, how intense and sincere he was. Cause His light to shine upon you . . . He would find the footprints of the dog and imprint of their bodies. All the days of your life . . . The brazen parade of her infected person. Watchman. Rainbows like rings of oil around her. Watchman. Shouldn’t we be? I spy you, Fatty, behind the tree. He wanted to rub the memory from his eyes. Glittering. Beads of water stood on her skin and drop fled into drop until they broke and ran, the streaks finally fading. Her navel was inside out—sweet spot where Zeus had tied her. She was so white and glistening, so . . . pale, though darker about the eyes, the nipples dark. Open us to evil. He made a slit in his lids. Burn our hearts. Shawls of sunlight spilled over the backs of the pews. Nay-ked-nessss. The droplets gathered at the point of her elbow and hung there, the sac swelling until it fell and spattered on her foot. Nay . . . nay. To enclose her like the water of the creek had closed her. Nay . . . Proper body for a lover. Joy to be a stone. Please, the peep-watch is over. Please hurry now. Hurry. Get out of my church.

There was a salad, with dressing in a separate container, some mashed potato, chicken legs, and the garlic bread.

One of the main roots of ungodliness is being a lover of pleasure more than a lover of God.

How the word “lover” fits in my mouth like alcove, Iike delight, like warm milk Sunday night music; And the word “wife” like steel, something unresolvable