Quotes from Corrie Ten Boom

Lord, I give to You the way I feel about Karel, my thoughts about our future—oh, You know! Everything! Give me Your way of seeing Karel instead. Help me to love him that way. That much.

For that which is in your heart can never be taken from you.

And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety—Oh

And while from inside we would hear coughs and stirrings, there was never a rustle in the listeners out the door.

The worst can happen, but the best remains

Clouds, too, can give light if only the sun shines on them.

There were answers to this and all my hard questions—for now I was content to leave them in my father's keeping.

Apparently I looked strong enough for harder work; I was told to report to the Phillips factory.

way back in 1927, Willem had written in his doctoral thesis, done in Germany, that a terrible evil was taking root in that land. Right at the university, he said, seeds were being planted of a contempt for human life such as the world had

the dormitory, it reminded me most of an anthill. Some women were already asleep after the long workday, but most were stirring about, some waiting for a turn at the toilets, others picking lice off themselves and their neighbors.

such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.

Someone's elbow dug into my back, another woman's feet were two inches from my face. How was it possible, packed so close, to be so utterly and miserably alone?

love is larger than the walls that shut it in. M

How often it is a small, almost unconscious event that marks a turning point.

How should a Christian act when evil was in power?

For I, too, had a hiding place when things were bad. Jesus was this place, the Rock cleft for me.

Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way, Corrie, God can give us the perfect way.

Faith is like radar which sees through the fog—the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.

Here in neutral Holland one sunlit June day followed another. Only a few people—like Willem—insisted that the war was Holland's tragedy too.

Corrie," he began gently, "when you and I go to Amsterdam—when do I give you your ticket?" I sniffed a few times, considering this. "Why, just before we get on the train." "Exactly. And our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things, too. Don't run out ahead of Him, Corrie. When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need—just in time.

What did he make of the news that President Wilson was sending American troops to France?

There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.

Do you know when she started praising the Wallers so highly?" Mama went on. "The day she left them. As long as she was there, she had nothing but complaints. The Wallers couldn't compare with the van Hooks where she'd been before. But at the van Hooks she'd actually been miserable. Happiness isn't something that depends on our surroundings, Corrie. It's something we make inside ourselves.

And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, back into Dutch. They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the lightbulb. I would think of Haarlem, each substantial church set behind its wrought-iron fence and its barrier of doctrine. And I would know again that in darkness God's truth shines most clear.