Quotes About Belief

If you're God's instrument, Owen, I said, how come you need my help to stuff a basketball?

You've witnessed what you c-c-c-call a miracle and now you believe-you believe everything, Pastor Merrill said. But miracles don't c-c-c-cause belief-real miracles don't m-m-m-make faith out of thin air; you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles.

You don't sound very well Owen. I pointed out to him. IF JESUS HAD TO BE BORN ON A DAY LIKE THIS. I DON'T THINK HE'D HAVE LASTED LONG ENOUGH TO BE CRUCIFIED. Owen said.

TODAY'S THE DAY! '… HE THAT BELIEVETH IN ME, THOUGH HE WERE DEAD, YET SHALL HE LIVE; AND WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE.

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.

It's long been a point of mine that the freedom of religion, which this country alleges to support, works two ways. We're not only free to practice the religion of our choice, we should be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.

IF WE CAN DO IT IN UNDER FOUR SECONDS, WE CAN DO IT IN UNDER THREE," he said. "IT JUST TAKES A LITTLE MORE FAITH." "It takes more practice," I told him irritably. "FAITH TAKES PRACTICE," said Owen Meany.

Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith's opposite.

Faith itself is a miracle

That was when I first began to think about certain events or specific things being important and having special purpose. Until then, the notion that anything had a designated, much less a special purpose would have been cuckoo to me. I was not what was commonly called a believer then, and I am a believer now; I believe in God, and I believe in the special purpose of certain events or specific things.

good books were the best protection from evil that Pepe had actually held in his hands—you could not hold faith in Jesus in your hands, not in quite the same way you could hold good books.

As a self-described Guadalupe girl, Lupe was sensitive to Guadalupe being overshadowed by the "Mary Monster." Lupe not only meant that Mary was the most dominant of the Catholic Church's "stable" of virgins; Lupe believed that the Virgin Mary was also "a domineering virgin.

But Lupe both genuinely worshiped Our Lady of Guadalupe and fiercely doubted her; Lupe's doubt was borne by the child's judgmental sense that Guadalupe had submitted to the Virgin Mary—that Guadalupe was complicitous in allowing Mother Mary to be in control.

God creates us out of love, but we don't want God, or we don't believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us—at least, He continues to try to get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don't inhabit a godless universe.

Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing.

What a power I had discovered! I felt certain I could refill those bleacher seats—one day, I was sure, I could "see" everyone who'd been there; I could find that special someone my mother had waved to, at the end.

As often as I feel certain that God exists, I feel as often at a loss to say what difference it makes—that He exists—or even: that to believe in God, which I do, raises more questions than it presents answers. Thus, when I am feeling my most faithful, I also feel full of a few hard questions that I would like to put to God—I mean, critical questions of the How-Can-He, How-Could-He, How-Dare-You variety.

It was best not to ask Pepe if reading or Jesus had saved him, or which one had saved him more.

GUYS," Owen Meany said. That spring, less than a month before Gravesend Academy's graduation exercises, the TV showed us a map of Thailand; five thousand U.S. Marines and fifty jet fighters were being

As Nora had also said, "Nothing will change." She meant the Catholic Church and the Republicans, but—according to Em—the Republicans would get worse.

Look at the world: look at how many of our peerless leaders presume to tell us that they know what God wants! It's not God who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in Him and who claim to pursue their ends in His holy name!

Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don't believe in the resurrection, you're not a believer.

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio could make Pepe feel as if he were a betrayer of the Catholic faith—as if he were a raving secular humanist, or worse. (Could there be anyone worse, from a Jesuitical perspective?) Father Alfonso and Father Octavio knew their Catholic dogma by rote; while the two priests talked circles around Brother Pepe, and they made Pepe feel inadequate in his belief, they were irreparably doctrinaire.

Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.