"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know." 
-Ernest Hemingway

"Why not cut down the nettles?" [my father] said. I looked down at the short scythe handle and across at the tall nettles. "It will hurt," I said. Then he looked at me with half a smile and a little shake of the head. "You decide for yourself when it will hurt," he said, suddenly getting serious. He walked over to the nettles and took hold of the smarting plants with his bare hands and began to pull them up with perfect calm, one after the other, throwing them into a heap, and did not stop before he had pulled them all up. Nothing in his face indicated that it hurt...

-Per Peterson, Out Stealing Horses

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

People in New York have extremely narrow horizons. The parochialism of the center is always greater than that of the provinces. In the provinces, they keep an eye on the center, but in the center they just gaze lovingly at themselves with both eyes.
-Leon Wieseltier

I'd had all these professors from Harvard in graduate school, and they didn't want to know what I really knew, which was how to behave at a debutante party in Fort Worth. They wanted to know about cowboys. 
-Dave Hickey

It's the best depiction of a friendship that I've ever read, an 843-page expansion on a comment Dizzy Gillespie made after his friend Charlie Parker died: "He was the other half of my heartbeat."

The problem lies with the one who is giving more but receiving less. We consider this situation to be unhealthy or damaging. Continue this lopsided relationship and there will be a cost. Which do we really need - to give love or receive it? We resist the question b/c we want to say both. Yet Scripture seems to favor the imbalance. Not that we aspire to have our friend or spouse love us less, but that “in humility [we] consider others better than [our]selves” (Phil 2:3). When the kingdom of God is ruling our hearts, we aspire more to serve than be served, honor more than be honored, and love more than be loved. This doesn’t mean that we don’t care about being loved; it simply means that we always want to outdo others in love. -Ed Welch

So, this is what we hear in Psalm 119. A person who has listened opens his heart to the Person who has spoken. A person who has listened opens his heart to the Person who has spoken. A person who has listened opens his heart to the Person who has spoken. -David Powlison

ardenthearted

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

-Cormac McCarthy