While some consider God's standards as too confining, a true believer sees them as loving and freeing.

But you are not his prisoner of war, unless you choose to be. Those days can be over. That's your call.

The lie will keep you living in shame from the past, when God wants to set you free for a better future. The lie will keep you from living with joy and freedom and confine you to a less-than existence.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

I was taught, growing up, that there are two ends of the political spectrum: left and right. But there's so much more than that. For me, it's about liberty versus authoritarianism.

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists - they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

When addiction runs in your family, you can't take chances. You can't try it once to see what it's like. One time can be the beginning of something you can't stop.

intimately close as if she plans to impart a secret. "A woman's past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. Her own music. To hear the tune, she must only stop talking. To herself, I mean. We're always trying to persuade ourselves of things.

Sooner or later, you have to shed your family's expectations and run the race on your own.