After a writer is dead, some anonymous scholar often collects the best quotes from all of his written works, reducing his laboriously written tomes to a few sound bites. A while back, I decided to save this anonymous scholar some work and compile quotations from my writings myself. I soon realized that I had many very important things to say. Here is the third compilation of nuggets of my enduring wisdom.

“It is a cold and cheerless place with stone walls, iron bars, and steel doors, the beds are hard and uncomfortable, the meals are often cold and unpalatable, consumed in a tense atmosphere, and the place is full of the noise of metal grating on metal, clanging keys, inmates groaning, cussing, and shouting, guards shouting and ordering, and the PA system squawking announcements, but it is not all hopeless as there are health services, counseling programs, libraries, educational opportunities, chapels, chaplains, and worship services, as well as visits, not only by friends, family members, and lawyers, but also by well-meaning volunteers, many of them Christians there to befriend the prisoners, and so it is true that some inmates do see the light and eventually turn their lives around, while others only become hardened, more knowledgeable about crime, and more connected to the criminal underworld during their incarceration, all of which is a clear demonstration that some prison sentences are too long.”

“If there were no disasters in the world, we would have no use for adjectives such as ‘unmitigated.’”

“The free time you have after retirement is the time that people expect you to give them for free.”

“Jesus embraced lepers, but He did not reassure them that they were fine as they were and did not need to be healed of their leprosy.”

“It was a dark and stormy knight, a swarthy man from southern Italy with unruly jet black hair and piercing black eyes that revealed a fierce and unpredictable temper.”

“I don’t go to car races. If I want to watch cars driving too fast on a crowded road and smashing into each other, I can go to the nearest commuter highway. There I can watch it for free. I can even join in if I want.”

“Morning had broken, and shards of light were scattered across the floor.”

“A sports fan is a guy who skips work to watch a big game and then complains that the players on his favorite team are a bunch of lazy bums who never ‘give a hundred and ten percent.’”

“I never suspected that my desire for change could create a problem for someone else.”

“I have aged like a fine whine.”

“I have a face for radio and a voice for print.”

“The Christian church is not a massive beast of an organization, although some misguided Christians have attempted to make it so. It is not an elephant lumbering over the landscape. Such a beast would be too easy to stop by putting a single bullet through its brain. Rather, the Christian church is an army of ants, scurrying in different directions and connecting and reconnecting in numerous ways.”

“I was having trouble finding pajamas, so I bought a track suit to wear at night. I call it my ‘night sweats.’”

“When you are not in a hurry, all of the lights are green.”

“Do you remember when there were fast food restaurants which would serve food quickly at an affordable price?”

“The busy older man planted less parsley, sage, and rosemary in his garden because what he really needed was more thyme.”