Shane Claiborne Quotes

Let’s open our hearts to [crime] victims and their families and give them something more than vengeance.

Sometimes broken people stay broken.

You can't demand truth and reconciliation. You have to demand truth - people have to hear it, and then they have to want to reconcile themselves to that truth.

The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think this one is better, because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.

It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.

I didn't just see myself as a film director here [in Life And Nothing More], but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death.

We must not only speak about forgiveness and reconciliation, we must act on these principles.

There are some  -  called 'death fatigue'  -  people who just grow so tired of death, so they don't want to keep perpetuating death and creating more victims and more anger and more pain. They want to heal from that, and I think that's exactly what God wants to do. And, interestingly enough, that's part of what God's original law was doing with the 'eye for an eye' thing. It was actually to limit the patterns of retaliation and then to begin to heal from that.

I wish I could take away your pain. I wish I could go back to when you were born and take you somewhere safe. Far away from all the people who’ve hurt you. (Kiara) You’re doing that now. (Nykyrian)

You can always forgive, you just can't really forget.

Forgiving the people that hurt us most allows us to heal from the wounds they left.

A subject I'm particularly passionate about is the criminal justice system and almost all of the policies that impact people's lives are determined on a local level.

It seems that most people need to experience a great deal of suffering before they will relinquish resistance and accept - before they will forgive.

Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.

Time heals all and heels hurt to walk in, but they go with the clutch that you carry your lip gloss in.

Someday she will be saved, and the past and all its pain will be rendered as smoothly palatable as the food we spoon to our babies.

Forgetting is something that time takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision.

I am openly pro-prosecution and make no bones about it. I don't think there are enough people out there sticking up for victims.

Even though it's warm here in L.A., people still have to wear layers - at least until their plastic surgery heals.

For every wound, the ointment of time.

I have yet to see a death case among the dozen coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial... People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.

A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

Forgiveness is something that we are often asked to grant and very few of us ever have the roadmap of how to get from the pain that we have experienced to being able to forgive someone.

It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.

Grief will happen either as an open healing wound or a closed festering wound, either honestly or dishonestly, either appropriately or inappropriately. But emotions will be expressed.