Sarah Arthur Quotes

#1. If imagination, as we've said, is the "region of discovery," story is the wardrobe door, sending our young people "further in" and "still further in" to possibilities and ideas they've never dreamed.

Sarah Arthur

#2. How do I happen to believe in God? . . . Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots. After awhile, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot. - FREDERICK BUECHNER

Sarah Arthur

#3. Theologian Stephen Crites says sacred stories are like dwelling places - like booths or tabernacles. We don't tell these stories as much as we inhabit them.

Sarah Arthur

#4. Since all the world is but a story, it were well for thee to buy the more enduring story, rather than the story that is less enduring. - ATTRIBUTED TO COLUMBA OF IONA SIXTH CENTURY A

Sarah Arthur

#5. C. S. Lewis said it this way: "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."12

Sarah Arthur

#6. Youth in our Sunday school class can repeat almost verbatim some obscure parable we dramatized last year, and yet they forget the core doctrinal statement we taught last week. Why is this? Why does story stick with us for so long?

Sarah Arthur

#7. Are we genuinely prepared to say that working in an office building or shopping in a mall is real, while reading Tolstoy is not?

Sarah Arthur

#8. Somehow the church has forgotten what it knew for so long: story goes beyond simply illustrating some spiritual point or other; it gives form to content; it incarnates meaning.

Sarah Arthur

#9. All fairy tales, Tolkien argued, echo the gospel of Jesus Christ in some way because the gospel is the True Story; it's the real fairy tale that crashed into the time line of history... 'The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact,' Lewis wrote

Sarah Arthur

#10. writes Madeleine L'Engle, "in kairos we are completely un-self-conscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are constantly checking our watches for chronological time."10

Sarah Arthur

#11. Just because your faith is shaken doesn't mean the faith is shaken. The eternal truths of the Kingdom aren't altered or affected by the experience that shook your beliefs.

Sarah Arthur

#12. Story has staying power. We remember the illustrations from Sunday's sermon for months afterward, but by coffee hour we're already struggling to recite the pastor's three main points, despite various acronyms meant to help us.

Sarah Arthur

#13. There's nothing more ridiculously juvenile than people thinking they have to be grown up and serious when it comes to living the Christian life.

Sarah Arthur

#14. Story affirms that not everything in the universe can or must be explained propositionally; the loose ends of story aren't always neatly tied together, because neither are the loose ends of our lives. "Life can bear only so much reality," says poet and pastor Calvin Miller.

Sarah Arthur

#15. No man is saved by his imagination," quipped nineteenth-century Scottish preacher George Morrison. "It is a question if any man is saved without it."18

Sarah Arthur

#16. To respect someone means to treat their ideas, personal space, belongings, and needs as equal in importance to your own, while to honor someone means to treat all those things as more important than your own.

Sarah Arthur

#17. For the story that shapes a child's universe also shapes the child - and by the child, the man thereafter. The memory of a burning fairy tale can govern behavior as truly as remembered fire will caution against fire forever. - WALTER WANGERIN

Sarah Arthur

#18. When was the last time you heard a long passage from a novel read aloud during Sunday school or worship? Or how about the last time a youth pastor subverted his or her "talk" through satire or parable rather than proof texting the six main points? Yet

Sarah Arthur

#19. We hunger for other worlds. We long to go beyond the streets we know, beyond our familiar woods and fields, and into the land of Faerie; to Middle-earth, Narnia, or Summerland; to the kingdom east of the sun and west of the moon. This longing isn't incidental.

Sarah Arthur

#20. Instinctively and empirically we know that stories have the power and the potential to capture hearts and imaginations - we're just not sure how or why this is so.

Sarah Arthur

#21. The cure for competing narratives is nothing more or less than the Apostles' Creed. Yes, I'll say that again: the creed is our story, succinctly stated.

Sarah Arthur

#22. let's get our semantics straight. Story does not equal fiction, much less "lies." It's the world we Christians inhabit as "people of the Book." We are story people. All

Sarah Arthur

#23. Truth is the aim of story. And though we must take into account the human author's subjectivity and personal slant, the best authors are those who tap universal longings and make connections to our real, lived humanity.

Sarah Arthur

#24. You are small. Your foe is big. But your God is bigger still.

Sarah Arthur

#25. While the Witch plays her pawn, the King sacrifices Himself, and to all appearances, the game is over. But the Lion has one last move ...

Sarah Arthur

#26. imagination is the image-making faculty of the intellect that helps us discover, process, and creatively express coherent meaning.

Sarah Arthur