Quotes by Jan Karon

“The Day Aunt Maude Left.”

“This months meeting is our first major outreach to people outside the group.”

“The longer Im with this group, the more I see that I have to change the things I do. Our laundry is hanging on the line outside right now. Were composting now. Were consolidating our car trips. You have to start small and go from there.”

“Its totally changing your body chemistry. Its a very healthy thing to do. It is said that 15 minutes of laughter is worth six hours of meditation.”

As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!

It was a wonderful life. To have a stage play right in this room, with real people acting real parts.

In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.

... for fog was merely a cloud that wasnt too smitten with itself to visit terra firma.

That was his favorite thing about books—they took you off to other people’s lives an’ places, but you could still set in your own chair by th’oil heater, warm as a mouse in a churn.

While most people took family for granted, he [Father Tim] took it for grace.

Why cant life always be lived under the stars, she said, with great music and family and friends?

Professor Morgan had called [Dooley] a lad of few words. That wasnt true. There were words spilling around in him all the time. Too many words. His problem was organizing them.

Lord, make me a blessing to someone today.

I cant say I have any confidence in confidence. I have confidence that God is with us in all things, both tender and tough.

Love is an endless act of forgiveness.

Love is an actual need, an urgent requirement of the heart, he read aloud from an old essay on marriage that he found in his files.Every properly constituted human being who entertains an appreciation of loneliness...and looks forward to happiness and content feels the necessity of loving. Without it, life is unfinished...

When his flock thronged into the midnight service, there was wonder on every face at the newly hung greens and the softly flickering candles on each windowsill. To the simple beauty of the historic church was added fresh, green hope, the lush scent of flowers in winter, and candle flame that cast its flickering shadows over the congregation like a shawl.

Maybe its because he never had any control over what was happening to him as a boy. Being late was somehow a way of taking charge.

Merry Christmas! someone shouted. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Merry Christmas!Merry Christmas!C-cookies for everbody! Sammy hollered. And looking both ways, they all fled across to the light, and the warmth, and the books, and the mystery.

As worthless as guilt was known to be, he couldnt help feeling it, seeing his wife work herself to exhaustion for a parish tea that would last only two hours.