Gerald Vann Quotes

#1. The person who knows a great deal about things but has never learnt to see, tends to be assertive; those who have once lost their hearts to a blade of grass or a glowworm and sensed God's omnipresence within them are at least on the road to reverence.

Gerald Vann

#2. How terrible when people are led to believe, or left to believe, that once they are in love they have nothing to do but live happily ever after, they have nothing further to learn.

Gerald Vann

#3. If you see things as in eternity, you are less a prey to the pain of their passing, and so you can learn the more easily not to clutch at them as they pass ... you learn to be reverent and not proudly possessive.

Gerald Vann

#4. And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.

Michael Chabon

#5. The complete encounter with the Lord will mark an end to history, but it will take place in history.

Gustavo Gutierrez

#6. If a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is.

Banana Yoshimoto

#7. Men are foolish to expect us to revere them, when, in the end, they amount to almost nothing.

Anne Desclos

#8. Worship is not part of the Christian life, it is the Christian life

Gerald Vann

#9. If you say that the history of the Church is a long succession of scandals, you are telling the truth, though if that is all you say, you are distorting the truth.

Gerald Vann

#10. To help all created things, that is the measure of all our responsibility; to be helped by all, that is the measure of our hope.

Gerald Vann

#11. If bright water you stain with mud, you nevermore will find it fit to drink.

Aeschylus

#12. Some people think that prayer just means asking for things, and if they fail to receive exactly what they asked for, they think the whole thing is a fraud.

Gerald Vann

#13. Nothing is more depressing and more illogical than aggressive Christianity.

Gerald Vann

#14. I stay in contact with kids, and that is a lot of fun for me, not only to get their letters but to meet them in schools and see that the books really have engaged their hearts and imaginations. That's what makes it so worthwhile.

Will Hobbs

#15. Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.

C.S. Lewis

#16. He sounded like a man with a mouthful of marbles, articulating his goatbone underjaw laboriously, the original one having been shot away.

Cormac McCarthy

#17. I've jumped out of an airplane 34 times. I've dove 212 feet under water. I've done a lot of things that defied death.

Jesse Ventura