Charles Martin · 352 pages
Rating: (6.2K votes)
“Never judge someone by their relatives.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“He picked up one of Lorna's roses and set it in my lap. "Here." I picked it up and smelled it. He poked me in the shoulder. "See what I mean? Thorns don't stop you from sniffing. Or putting them in a vase on the kitchen table. You work around them.... Cause the rose is worth it... Think what you'd miss.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“You take the bad with the good, Rise up through it. Live in the mist of it. It's the bad that lets you know ho good the good really is. Don't let the bad leave you thinking like there ain't any good. There is, and lots of it, too. ”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“I had this dream that my life was a rolling canvas. Everyday it rolled off the sheet, bleached white, into the beach of my life. Come sunup, I'd begin to paint it with my thoughts and actions. My breathing, my living, and my dying. Some days the pictures pleased me, maybe pleased others, pleased God himself, but some days, some months, even some years, they didn't, and I didn't ever want to look at them again. But the thing is this . . . every day, no matter what I'd painted the day before, I got a new canvas, washed white. 'Cause each night the tide rolled in, scrubbed it clean, and receded, taking it's stains with it. And my dreams . . . I just stood on the beach and watched all that stuff wash out to sea.- Nothing more than ripples in the water. No canvas is ever stained clean through. Not one.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“He thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“Well...letting the cat out of the bag is a lot easier than putting it in.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“You can put your boots in the oven, but that doesn't make them biscuits. - You can say whatever you want about something, but that doesn't change what it is.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“...forgive your enemies...it messes with their heads.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“Scientists say that these things evolved this way over millions of years." He shook his head. "That's a bunch of bunk. I don't think an animal can just all-of-a-sudden decide it wants to make light grow out it's butt. What kind of nonsense is that? Animals don't make light." He pointed to the stars. "God does that. I don't know why or how, but I'm pretty sure it's not chance. It's not some haphazard thing he does in his spare time."
He looked at me, and his expression changed from one of wonder to seriousness, to absolute convicton. "Chase, I don't believe in chance." He held up the jar. "This is not chance, neither are the stars."....."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.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“It's so dry the trees are bribing the dogs.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“She smiled, tilted her head, and . . . have you ever seen video of melting glaciers where huge chunks, the size of skyscrapers, break off and crash into the sea? If hearts could do that, then when her hair slid from behind her ear and down her eyes, and the right side of her lip turned up, I heard my heart crack down the middle.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“Time to paint your but white and run with antelope-in English- Stop arguing and do as your told.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“Gonna be a real frog-strangling turd-floater.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“Sometimes good judgement comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgement.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“Identity does not grow out of action until it has taken root in belonging.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“If my life were still a movie, this is the part that would end up on the cutting room floor. We were all just fill-ins for a long-running soap opera. The actors changed, but the story seldom did. Certainly not the action.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“If God can make a firefly’s butt light up like a star, then anything is possible. Anything.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“The only monster you need to worry about in this life is the one that stares at you from the mirror each morning. You tame him, make friends with him, and the rest of life is nothing you can’t handle.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“A change in paperwork [birth certificate] can't erase words stamped on the human heart.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“O amor faz destas coisas. Nomeia o inominável e confere voz ao silêncio”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“And they ate supper before they said grace...Oh, um...she moved into his house, stayed awhile, and then they got married.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“I’m no expert, but I know one thing about anger—it’s like alcohol. At some point, if you pour enough in there, it’s coming back up. You may think you’ve built up a tolerance, but the truth is this—no man, not even Unc, can bury it so deep that it doesn’t erupt at some point like Vesuvius and splatter your soul across the earth.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“Words that soak into your ears are whispered, not yelled.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“The only monster you need to worry about in this life is the one that stares at you from the mirror each morning. You tame him, make friends with him, and the rest of life is nothing you can't handle.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“I quit screaming at God a long time ago, ’cause I reckon he knows a thing or two about hurt.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“If manhood is passed down, if it is a mantle cut from the cloth of one and draped across another, it is not done so using titles or accolades. Not hardly. It occurs there—in that spout now resting neck-high—pouring down the spine and into the belly in a language that has never been transcribed, but that every boy on the planet understands and has always understood.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“That's life. You take the bad with the good. Rise up through it. Live in the midst of it. It's the bad that lets you know how good the good really is. Don't let the bad leave you thinking like there ain't no good. There is, and lots of it, too.”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“You can say whatever you want about something, but that doesn’t change what it is.” He”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
“That’s life. You take the bad with the good. Rise up through it. Live in the midst of it. It’s the bad that lets you know how good the good really is. Don’t let the bad leave you thinking like there ain’t no good. There is, and lots of it, too.” “You”
― Charles Martin, quote from Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery
Charles Martin
Born place: in The United States
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“Life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. ROSSITER WORTHINGTON RAYMOND”
― quote from Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying
“My earliest memories are of CP4 — that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex directions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this" — he motioned at the surrounding more-or-less-Euclidean space — for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single three-dimensional space.”
― Greg Egan, quote from Schild's Ladder
“She fell asleep, leaning on his chest, and he edged her a little off a particularly painful bruise, leaned his head back against the tree he had propped them up against, and closed his own eyes. ”
― Robin McKinley, quote from The Outlaws of Sherwood
“We weren't born yesterday. We are from [New York]. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from the Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale
“Such love is bound to suffer, because it will wake up one day.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
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