Catherine Marshall > Quotes

“A Christian has no business being satisfied with mediocrity. He's supposed to reach for the stars. Why not? He's not on his own anymore. He has God's help now.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“The only time I ever find my dealings with God less than clear-cut is when I'm not being honest with Him. The fuzziness is always on my side, not His.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Evil is real - and powerful. It has to be fought, not explained away, not fled. And God is against evil all the way. So each of us has to decide where WE stand, how we're going to live OUR lives. We can try to persuade ourselves that evil doesn't exist; live for ourselves and wink at evil. We can say that it isn't so bad after all, maybe even try to call it fun by clothing it in silks and velvets. We can compromise with it, keep quiet about it and say it's none of our business. Or we can work on God's side, listen for His orders on strategy against the evil, no matter how horrible it is, and know that He can transform it.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“My father always told us that if we will let God, He can use even our disappointments, even our annoyances to bring us a blessing. There's a practical way to start the process too: by thanking Him for whatever happens, no matter how disagreeable it seems.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“I still don't understand anything- exept that somehow I know that You are love. And that in my heart has been so great a love for Christy as I did not know could exist on this earth. You, God, must be responsible. You must have put it there. So what do I do with it now?”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Have you ever watched a baby learning to walk? He totters, arms stretched out to balance himself. He wobbles - and falls, perhaps bumps his nose. Then he puts the palms of his little hands flat on the floor, hikes his rear end up, looks around to see if anybody is watching him. If nobody is, usually he doesn't bother to cry, just precariously balances himself - and tries again. Well, the baby can teach us. What you've undertaken...isn't a state of perfection to be arrived at all of the sudden. It's a WALK, and a walk isn't static but ever-changing. We Friends say that all discouragement is from an evil source and can only end in more evil. Wallowing in self-condemnation or feeling sorry for yourself is worse than falling on your face in the first place... So thee is human.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“When you heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people - especially the ripsnorting sinners - so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Clean up a pigsty," she commented one evening, "and if the creatures in it still have pig-minds and pig-desires, soon it will be the same old pigsty again.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“The house, it's already been a-settin' here for a hundred years. It'll be right here tomorrow. It's today I must be livin'.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“The search for God begins at the point of need.”
― Catherine Marshall, Something More: In Search of a Deeper Faith

“Have you ever thought that the only ugly things in this Cove are man's fault, while the beautiful things are God's work? Look at those mountains.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Living in the middle of beauty like this, we've no call to have puny ideas about God. Why do you suppose His world is so fancy-fine, so full of wonderment if He doesn't want everything to be good and perfect and right and healthy? But we can spoil His good work. When we mess things up, then we shouldn't blame Him and try to make ourselves feel better by contending that it's what He wanted.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“It's today I must be living.”
― Catherine Marshall

“So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It's quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you've come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“What do you do when strength is called for and you have no strength? You evoke a power beyond your own and use stamina you did not know you had. You open your eyes in the morning grateful that you can see the sunlight of yet another day. You draw yourself to the edge of the bed and then put one foot in front of the other and keep going. You weep with those who gently close the eyes of the dead, and somehow, from the salt of your tears, comes endurance for them and for you. You pour out that resurgence to minister to the living.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Truth could never be wholly contained in words.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Some of what I wrote bordered on blasphemy....If there was a God, He would have to be truth. And in that case, candor--however impertinent--would be more pleasing to Him than posturing.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“I have observed that when any of us embarks on the pursuit of happiness for ourselves, it eludes us. Often I've asked myself why. It must be because happiness comes to us only as a dividend. When we become absorbed in something demanding and worthwhile above and beyond ourselves, happiness seems to be there as a by-product of the self-giving. That should not be a startling truth, yet I'm surprised by how few people understand and accept it. Have we made a god of happiness?..." You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide. "John 15:16 RSV....Somehow that passage was like light penetrating their darkness: much of their unhappiness, they realized, was caused by self-centeredness.”
― Catherine Marshall, Something More: In Search of a Deeper Faith

“I'd long since learned that no difference in viewpoint should ever be allowed to cause the least break in love. Indeed, it cannot, if it's real love.
...But relationships can be kept intact without compromising one's own beliefs. And if we do not keep them intact, but give up and allow the chasm, we're breaking the second greatest commandment.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“dont wish upon a star reach for one”
― Catherine Marshall, Stage Fright

“Fixin’ onything is man’s work,” came Opal’s firm answer. Tearin’ down or killin’, that thar’s easy. Any addle-pated fool kin pull the trigger of a rifle-gun or fling a rock. It’s fixin’ that’s hard, takes a heap more doin’.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“I often marveled that the interior peace of the woman was reflected so faithfully in her surroundings. Even the selection and arrangements of her possessions gave an aura of uncluttered calm. In addition, there was a directness in her approach to all of life--including housekeeping--that never failed to fascinate me.
Miss Alice was a person to whom color, symmetry of line and contrast of texture were important.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“God insists that we ask, not because He needs to know our situation, but because we need the spiritual discipline of asking.”
― Catherine Marshall, Adventures in Prayer

“To know God as He really is-in His essential nature and character-is to arrive at a citadel of peace that circumstances may storm, but can never capture.”
― Catherine Marshall

“There's always the danger that the extreme feminist will end up quite unfulfilled as a girl.”
― Catherine Marshall

“Did people always have to wait for pestilence or war or tragedy to be shocked into forgetting about themselves?”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“I could also see just by looking around me how we tend to over-romanticize history. Life in those other centuries had not been all knights-and-ladies stuff. There was nothing romantic about cottages where eight or ten people slept in one room with no privacy; where there were no bathrooms, not even outside privies—even if the cottage did happen to have picturesque thatch on the roof. There was nothing glamorous in any century about no running water in which to bathe or about fleas on human beings; or about the blackgum twigs with which some of the women right now, in 1912, dipped snuff and then rubbed their teeth and gums. So many of the people had terrible-looking teeth or no teeth at all. And the eye trouble that was so prevalent. I had learned that it was trachoma and that it was a dangerous infection which, if unchecked, resulted in blindness.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“We don't have to accept blandness in life. God, who is the author of creativity, is ready to make a dull life adventuresome the moment we allow his Holy Spirit to go to work inside us.”
― Catherine Marshall, Something More: In Search of a Deeper Faith

“I understood that the reason we have to accept other people is simply because God receives us just the way we are. Yes, all of us to the last person...

I had never thought it should be that way. Had I been doing it, I would have arranged gradations of acceptability according to how bad or how good we were--or how hard we have tried. But... the Power who broods over our aching world has quite a different idea: He persists in receiving us and loving us all even when we reject Him and refuse to have anything to do with Him, even when we strut our little intellects and insist that He does not exist.”
― Catherine Marshall, Christy

“Perceptive people like you wound more easily than others. But if we’re going to work on God’s side, we have to decide to open our hearts to the griefs and pain all around us. It’s not an easy decision. A dangerous one too. And a tiny narrow door to enter into a whole new world.

But in that world a great experience waits for us: meeting the One who’s entered there before us. He suffers more than any of us could because His is the deepest emotion and the highest perception…He doesn’t just leave us and Himself in the anguish. At the point where His ultimate in love meets His total capacity to absorb and feel all our agony, there the miracle happens and the exterior situation changes. I’ve seen that miracle”
― Catherine Marshall