I love words. I love reading. I love quotes. I collect quotes like some collect stones and stamps. I used to get teased on the bus because every time I got on the bus, I would pull a book from the front pocket of my backpack and put my nose in it the whole way to/from school. They actually called me bookworm, which bothered me at the time but now seems totally uncreative.

 I was painfully shy as a kid, and wasn’t much for making new friends. As I got older, I took to highlighting/underlining/writing notes in my books as well. I would read a quote that just made my heart stop, and I would mark it. It was such a habit that I hated borrowing books from people because I had to be extra careful the whole time I was reading not to mark up their book. So I would keep a notepad nearby to write down sentences I loved.

I have a word document that’s nearly 75 pages long of quotes I have collected over the past ten years. (Actually, that’s a combination of a word document on my hard drive at home and one in my Google Docs…I heart Google docs). Sometimes I like to go and just scroll through and let the words seep in and remind me where I was when I read it the first time.

I did that this morning real quick because I had to add a song lyrics. And as I scrolled through, I found this awesome quote related to Advent:

“A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes …
and is completely dependent on the fact
that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside,
is not a bad picture of Advent.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
German pastor and philosopher (1906-1945);
imprisoned and executed for his attempt to overthrow Adolf Hitler.