Quotes from Jesus Land: A Memoir

Julia Scheeres ·  384 pages

Rating: (14.9K votes)


“It took him a while to figure out that gaining an audience was not the same thing as gaining friends.”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


“Mother's got romantic notions about toiling the land - or mostly, about her children toiling the land. And with fifteen acres, there's always something that needs toiling with.”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


“Seems we can never just be brother and sister like in other families. Our whole lives, people have felt an urge to make up special names for what we are. at Lafayette Christian, we were the 'Oreo twins' or 'Kimberly and Arnold' after the characters on Diff'rent Strokes. And while those nicknames bugged us, they were certainly preferable to what they call us at Harrison”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


“Life may not be fair, but when you have someone to believe in, life can be managed, and sometimes, even miraculous.”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


“So we are drawn to graveyards, where we can be close to the dead and ponder their fate as well as our own.”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir



“The first time it happened, I laid there marveling at the beauty of it, wondering why God would forbid such bliss when He makes us endure so much misery.”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


“It's just after three o'clock when we hit County Road 50. The temperature has swelled past ninety and the sun scorches our backs as we swerve our bikes around pools of bubbling tar.”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


“So much for the famous 'Hoosier hospitality.' When we moved to our new house, no one stopped by with strawberry rhubarb pie or warm wishes. Our neighbors must have taken one look at David and Jerome and locked their doors - and minds - against us”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


“Neither of us uttered a word about what happened. We never do. But I can't smudge it from my mind. The farm boys' sneering red faces. The runt shaking the fence. The brown lump of spit tobacco. The anguish in David's eyes. They don't know the first thing about us; they just hate us because we're black”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


“As we paint each other's nails Cinnamon Vixen, I consider telling her how bad things are at home. After she and Dan and Laura left for college, everything got worse. Mother's mood swings, Dad's violence, the name-calling at school.”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir



“Many readers say they also feel like outcasts in their hometowns, oppressed by religionists, racists, homophobes, or other pea-brained busybodies. The advice I give them is this: If you feel like a misfit in the place where you were born, move somewhere else. I did. I now reside in the most progressive town in the country—Berkeley, California.”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


About the author

Julia Scheeres
Born place: Lafayette, Indiana, The United States
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Popular quotes

“Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. What remains in the bum or studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the obscene Presence in the corner of the room and knows that the door is locked, that there aren’t any windows. And now the thing bears down on him. He feels a hand on his sleeve, smells a stinking breath, as the executioner’s assistant leans almost amorously toward him. “Your turn next, brother. Kindly step this way.” And in an instant his quiet terror is transmuted into a frenzy as violent as it is futile. There is no longer a man among his fellow men, no longer a rational being speaking articulately to other rational beings; there is only a lacerated animal, screaming and struggling in the trap. For in the end fear casts out even a man’s humanity. And fear, my good friends, fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life. Fear of the much touted technology which, while it raises out standard of living, increases the probability of our violently dying. Fear of the science which takes away the one hand even more than what it so profusely gives with the other. Fear of the demonstrably fatal institutions for while, in our suicidal loyalty, we are ready to kill and die. Fear of the Great Men whom we have raised, and by popular acclaim, to a power which they use, inevitably, to murder and enslave us. Fear of the war we don’t want yet do everything we can to bring about.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Ape and Essence


“But, my wolf, compassion is often mistaken for weakness when the fact is, there is very little that is more powerful than the courage it takes to give it. The one thing I know that’s even more powerful is the courage it takes to forge your own path, make your own mark and in doing so, make change.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from With Everything I Am


“I wish that you will find love. It is the only thing in life that makes the pain of being alive bearable.”
― Lucinda Riley, quote from The Seven Sisters


“The heart of metaphor is inference. Conceptual metaphor allows inferences in sensory-motor domains (e.g., domains of space and objects) to be used to draw inferences about other domains (e.g., domains of subjective judgment, with concepts like intimacy, emotions, justice, and so on). Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives.”
― George Lakoff, quote from Metaphors We Live By


“Christian ethics is not a matter of discovering what's going on in the world and getting in tune with it. It isn't a matter of doing things to earn God's favor. It is not about trying to obey dusty rulebooks from long ago or far away. It is about practicing, in the present, the tunes we shall sing in God's new world.”
― N.T. Wright, quote from Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense


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