Quotes from Charles Martin

If your knuckles are bloodier than your knees, then you're fighting the wrong battle.

Used to tell me that people spend money on three things: what they love, what they worship, and what helps ease their pain.

To us—those who seek the solace of the marsh—it is a stage where God paints—yellow in the morning, green toward noon, brownish in the afternoon, and blood red toward evening. It is the sentinel that stands guard at the ocean's edge, protecting the sea from the runoff that would kill it. It is a selfless and sacrificial place. And when I close my eyes, it is also the smell of home.

If God was down here drinking His coffee, then He was on his second cup, because He'd already Windexed the sky. Only the streaks remained.

Play simple, and people will join in. Sing along. Which, by the way, is the goal. Our job is to put a song in their mouths and let them sing it back to us. That's all that really matters." Then he added, "The great players aren't great because of all the notes they can play, but because of the ones they don't play.

And neither are you. So, if your mind is telling you that God slipped up and might have made one giant mistake when it comes to you, you remember the firefly's butt." The

For we alone are the keepers of the letters that set us free.

Brothers and sisters, a demon's job is to kill you. To beat you to death. To rob you of anything that is not painful. This railing is where you give more than you take. Where you steal back. Where you kill what's killing you. Then, having chased and slain, you return"—Pastor John pointed to the pews and folding chairs—"bloody but unharmed, different but the same, changed but unchanged, moved but unmoved. A living battleground.

My job was to create a shelf, a platform. Scaffolding. To fill the air around her with a structure. Something safe.

Story is the bandage of the broken. Sutures of the shattered. The tapestry upon which we write our lives. Upon which we lay the bodies of the dying and the about-to-come-to-life. And if it's honest, true, hiding nothing, revealing all, then it is a raging river and those who ride it find they have something to give—that they are not yet empty.

But good hymns? They live past the people who wrote them. Hymns never die.

She blazed, burned herself out, and then disappeared into the silent deep, sounding the echoes of remembrance throughout a hollow and shattered heart.