Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
—Annie Dillard
Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.
—Alice Walker
Perhaps the most lasting pleasure in life is the pleasure of not going to church.
—William Inge
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
—Aldous Huxley
There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord.… I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to "rock.
—James Baldwin
It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection of, a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threaten to destroy the whole race of [humankind] and the world with [it] .… I make monastic silence a protest against the lies of politicians, propagandists, and agitators, and when I speak it is to deny that my faith and my church can ever be aligned with these forces of injustice and destruction. But it is true, nevertheless, that the faith in which I believe is also invoked by many who believe in war, believe in racial injustices, believe in self-righteous and lying forms of tyranny. My life must, then, be a protest against these also, and perhaps against these most of all.
—Thomas Merton
The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
—Fred Allen
Even when we were standing in church and I was getting ready to take my vow I can remember wishing that you were standing there instead of him.
—Nicholas Sparks in The Best of Me