Chapel Quotes & Sayings

The splendor of a human heart that trusts it is loved unconditionally gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony", Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", the sight of 10,000 butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom. Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it. — Brennan Manning

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays ... and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way. — Bono

I make a special appeal regarding how young women might dress for Church services and Sabbath worship. We used to speak of "best dress" or "Sunday dress," and maybe we should do so again. In any case, from ancient times to modern we have always been invited to present our best selves inside and out when entering the house of the Lord - and a dedicated LDS chapel is a "house of the Lord." Our clothing or footwear need never be expensive, indeed should not be expensive, but neither should it appear that we are on our way to the beach. When we come to worship the God and Father of us all and to partake of the sacrament symbolizing the Atonement of Jesus Christ, we should be as comely and respectful, as dignified and appropriate as we can be. We should be recognizable in appearance as well as in behavior that we truly are disciples of Christ, that in a spirit of worship we are meek and lowly of heart, that we truly desire the Savior's Spirit to be with us always. — Jeffrey R. Holland

I can think of so many tough guys that by definition it's their job to be tough and they're all in chapel. That's such a misconception and it's kind of gone out the window. Guys feel more comfortable going to chapel. I remember when I first started, guys were nervous about it and it was kind of a secret. There was still that stigma that came with it, but it's definitely been removed and (the faith movement) is definitely growing. — Matt Cullen

The night Kate Harker decided to burn down the school chapel, she wasn't angry or drunk. She was desperate. — V.E Schwab

Look at every territorial dispute you care to mention. Northern Ireland, for instance." "Religion in that case," Jamie ventured. "Not just. Religion was the badge of identity, but it wasn't really about whether you went to Mass or to a tub-thumping Protestant chapel. It was a result of the movement of people. The Protestant planters - many of them Scots - replaced the native Irish, remember? Movement of people again. — Alexander McCall Smith

There's no such thing as a coincidence in a prayer chapel. — Karen Barber

It's an ironic thing about being an immigrant kid, growing up - 'cause I grew up in the UK and went to a British boarding school and we would go to chapel every Sunday morning. And we'd actually have religious studies and religious studies means Christian studies where you study the Bible. — Aasif Mandvi

And if I can't be with you I would rather have a different face
And if I can't be near you I would rather be adrift in space
And if the gods desert us I would burn this chapel into flames
And if someone tries to hurt you I would put myself in your place — Neil Finn

Progress had not invaded, science had not enlightened, the little hamlet of Pieuvrot, in Brittany. They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as little as its learning. They toiled hard all the week on the ungrateful soil that yielded them but a bare subsistence in return; they went regularly to mass in the little rock-set chapel on Sundays and saint's days; believed implicitly all that monsieur le cure said to them, and many things which he did not say; and they took all the unknown, not as magnificent but as diabolical — Eliza Lynn Linton

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

For history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England. — T. S. Eliot

Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. 'What did they do to you?'
Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. 'They'-he looks about the Chapel-'cured me. They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There's a lot of it about. The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug ... a veined, scrawny, dribbling ... bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left. — David Mitchell

He sat in the chapel for hours picking his way through fugues. A dozen notes, hardly music. But then those few notes spoke to each other, subject and answer, by repetition, by diminution, by augmentation, even looping backwards on themselves in a course like the retrograde motion of Mars. He listened as if he had as many ears as fingertips, and, like a blind man, could feel textures that were barely there. At the end of two or three pages of music he would hear all the voices twining together in a construction of such dizzying power that the walls of the chapel could barely contain it. — Kate Grenville

Once she'd thought all the knowledge in the world was contained in the princess academy's thirteen books. Now she faced thousands. She wondered if she should curtsy as if she were entering a chapel. — Shannon Hale

He was an old hand at the Camp now, his hollow countenance and the intensity of his averted gaze familiar to all who came and went around him. Some had carried to other camps a description of his lanky, quiet presence, had spoken of his strangeness, his regular, lone attendance before the chapel statue. He had made no friends, but in his duties was conscientious and persevering and reliable, known for such qualities to the officers who commanded him. He had dug latrines, metalled roads, adequately performed cookhouse duties, followed instructions as to the upkeep of equipment, and was the first to volunteer when volunteers were called for. That he bore his torment with fortitude was known to no one. — William Trevor

I'm not going for the sixteenth chapel. — Justin Bieber

The morning was bright and propitious. Before their departure, mass had been said in the chapel, and the protection of St. Ignatius invoked against all contingent evils, but especially against bears, which, like the fiery dragons of old, seemed to cherish unconquerable hostility to the Holy Church. ("The Legend Of Monte Del Diablo"). — Bret Harte

I wondered if I could call my experience in the chapel prayer
not a long list of asking, after all, or a rote string of words, but rather a kind of sacred listening. [p, 355] — Kim Edwards

You must pray with all your might. That does not mean saying your prayers, or sitting gazing about in church or chapel with eyes wide open while someone else says them for you. It means fervent, effectual, untiring wrestling with God. This kind of prayer be sure the devil and the world and your own indolent, unbelieving nature will oppose. They will pour water on this flame. — William Booth

My friends, it is one thing to go to church or chapel; it is quite another thing to go to God. — Charles Spurgeon

A man has perished; his corpse is dust,
and his people have passed from the land;
it is a book which makes him remembered
in the mouth of a speaker.
More excellent is a [papyrus] roll than a built house,
than a chapel in the west.
It is better than an established villa,
than a stela in a temple... — Anonymous

God speaks when you put on your hiking boots, take a walking stick, and abandon yourself to the beauty of God's creation. God speaks when you enter the chapel and find yourself standing in the presence of a mighty God who loves you. God speaks when you just listen. It's as though you can hear God praying! — Don Wilton

The Apotheosis of Washington - a 4,664-square-foot fresco that covers the canopy of the Capitol Rotunda - was completed in 1865 by Constantino Brumidi. Known as "The Michelangelo of the Capitol," Brumidi had laid claim to the Capitol Rotunda in the same way Michelangelo had laid claim to the Sistine Chapel, by painting a fresco on the room's most lofty canvas - the ceiling. Like Michelangelo, Brumidi had done some of his finest work inside the Vatican. Brumidi, however, immigrated to America in 1852, abandoning God's largest shrine in favor of a new shrine, the U.S. Capitol, which now glistened with examples of his mastery - from the trompe l'oeil of the Brumidi Corridors to the frieze ceiling of the Vice President's Room. And yet it was the enormous image hovering above the Capitol Rotunda that most historians considered to be Brumidi's masterwork. Robert — Dan Brown

...Leaning on her maid, she stole through the winding galleries, and lightly descending the stairs, entered the long hall, which terminated in a dark arched passage that opened into the chapel. This was a wild and gloomy structure: beneath it were the vaults which contained the ancestors of the earl of Dunreath, whose deeds and titles were enumerated on gothic monuments: their dust-covered banners waving around in sullen dignity to the rude gale, which found admittance through the broken windows. The light which the maid held produced deep shadows, that heightened the solemnity of the place. — Regina Maria Roche

On the night of the winter solstice, when the dead get their annual reprieve, they go up to the 24-hour donut shop and wedding chapel to get hitched. Marriage is a good and proper pursuit for dead people. For a while, it relieves the dark, shuddering loneliness of the afterlife. — Rachel Swirsky

This holy staircase is composed of eight-and-twenty steps, said to have belonged to Pontius Pilate's house and to be the identical stair on which Our Saviour trod, in coming down from the judgment-seat. Pilgrims ascend it, only on their knees. It is steep; and, at the summit, is a chapel, reported to be full of relics; into which they peep through some iron bars, and then come down again, by one of two side staircases, which are not sacred, and may be walked on. — Charles Dickens

Whilst the beautifully crafted image of Michel Angelo's youthful looking priestess
looks out from her position on the ceiling of the sistine chapel linked forever with
Heaven Earth and Time. — Daniel Peter Buckley

I went to Colby College in Waterville, ME and did picture it when I was writing 'Cum Laude.' So many of the physical details were included, like the loop where people jogged. The story of the chapel is also borrowed from Colby ... but the students and cast of characters are fictional. — Cecily Von Ziegesar

If I were to die today, she thought, and someone were to think over my life, they'd never know that moments like this, here on the Horseferry Road, between a Baptist chapel and a tobacconist's, were the truest things in it. — Sarah Waters

I love this site. It was lovingly hand-shaped it. Your soul transformed this into this art. It was perfect. I have tried to create another equal to it ... but to no avail, so I will just have to paint the Sistine Chapel. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Before I took the veil, I was ornamented for the ceremony, and was clothed in a rich dress belonging to the Convent, which was used on such occasions; and placed not far from the altar in the chapel, in the view of a number of spectators who had assembled, perhaps about forty. — Maria Monk

With you a part of me hath passed away;
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by this wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.
But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease,
And the dear honour of your amity;
For these once mine, my life is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be,
What I keep of you, or you rob from me. — George Santayana

His love was an architect that entirely remade the reality of the chapel, transforming it into a cathedral as grand as any in the world. — Dean Koontz

You ever seen that painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, where God's reaching out and touching the finger of an angel? That was what it felt like at the moment my lips touched hers. It was more than just a kiss. It was something spiritual. — Chance Carter

So the Trustees of Ohio State were right in 1956 when they canned the English instructor for assigning Catcher in the Rye to his freshman class. They knew there is no qualitative difference between the kid who thinks it's funny to fart in chapel, and Che Guevara. They knew then Holden Caulfield would found SDS. — E.L. Doctorow

Fashion is everywhere. Everywhere! Flowers are fashion to me, the sky is fashion, my garden is fashion. My darling, the Sistine Chapel is fashion. — Anna Dello Russo

Who will you be when faced with the end?
The end of a kingdom,
The end of good men,
Will you run?
Will you hide?
Or will you hunt down evil with a venomous pride?

Rise to the ashes,
Rise to the winter sky,
Rise to the calling,
Make heard the battle cry.
Let it scream from the mountains
From the forest to the chapel,
Because death is a hungry mouth
And you are the apple.

So who will you be when faced with the end?
When the vultures are circling
And the shadows descend
Will you cower?
Or will you fight?
Is your heart made of glass?
Or a pure Snow White? — Lily Blake

He lived in this dream world more than in the real one. The real world: classroom, courtyard, library, dormitory, and chapel were only the surface, a quivering film over the dream-filled super-real world of images. — Hermann Hesse

I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet. It all happened at sixty miles an hour and on days when the clock stopped and all of humanity fit into a little chapel, into a pinecone, a shot of ouzo, a snail's shell, a piece of soggy rye on the pavement. — Mary Ruefle

I want to shake them for their ignorance and scream that their Sistine Chapel is filled with cracks. — Michelle Hodkin

Only Marxists," Dr. Iggy concluded, opening the door to usher Joe into the chapel room, "still
believe in an objective history. Marxists and a few disciples of Ayn Rand. — Robert Shea

When we gather for worship, whether with a handful in a storefront chapel or with thousands in St. Peter's Square, we perform a drama with different parts-speaking and singing and praying and giving money and baptizing and eating bread and drinking wine-all for the delight of God. — David Jeremiah

The faint aroma of gum and calico that hangs about a library is as the fragrance of incense to me. I think the most beautiful sight is the gilt-edged backs of a row of books on a shelf. The alley between two well-stocked shelves in a hall fills me with the same delight as passing through a silent avenue of trees. The colour of a binding-cloth and its smooth texture gives me the same pleasure as touching a flower on its stalk. A good library hall has an atmosphere which elates. I have seen one or two University Libraries that have the same atmosphere as a chapel, with large windows, great trees outside, and glass doors sliding on noiseless hinges. — R.K. Narayan

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds. — Michael Ondaatje

In the chapel you prayed to be a saint and now I will make you a god. — Anne Rice

We got married drunk in Vegas ... We dated for a year, and we got married at a drive-through chapel in a cab. [We thought] you have to go down to the courthouse and sign papers and stuff, so who knew? We were married, and apparently now that [Rob] is getting married for real, his lawyer dug up something. — Janeane Garofalo

The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's chapel and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, you cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a gentleman. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

He takes a deep breath and gives me one of those smiles that almost blinds me. The kind of smile that makes me want to drag him to a little chapel in the woods, say I do, and make him the last boy I ever kiss. — Jillian Dodd

But five minutes later the five-hundred-year-old Roman chapel was filled to the rafters with the soaring sounds of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody, — Tiffany Reisz

Even Michelangelo got paid for doing the Sistine Chapel. To those artists who say they're doing it for the love of art, I say: Get real. — Gianni Versace

(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser)
At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was ... — Pierre Boulez

THE story of Mr. Knill's prophesying that I should preach the gospel in Rowland Hill's Chapel, and to the largest congregations in the world, has been regarded by many as a legend, but it was strictly true. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The trees were his chapel and the hillsides his cathedral. — Aleksandra Layland

The children seemed to cast their Precursors like shadows about the house, sometimes tangibly, in the sound of a voice, sometimes by suggestion, because it was striking the hour for their return from a walk, sometimes mysteriously, because inside the shell of their mother's head the children were painted like angels on the roof of a chapel. — Enid Bagnold

There are no conditions in which we subordinate the interests of the class as a whole to the interests of any sect, any chapel, any separate organization. — Ernest Mandel

Luther once wrote, "Where God builds His Church, the devil erects a chapel next to it."15 Luther's point was that the devil is always seeking to mimic the works of God. — Robert H. Bennett

Outside the school's walls the Swinging Sixties are in full cry, but inside them the band of Empire plays on. Twice-daily chapel services praise the school's war dead to the detriment of its living, value the white man above lesser breeds, and preach chastity to boys who can find sexual stimulation in a Times editorial. — John Le Carre

Everybody thought I was crazy. They thought I should take the money and run. But there was just something special about being a senior at Chapel Hill. I just couldn't leave. — Lorrie Fair

She's worth it. And one day maybe she'll let me chase her into a chapel. — Leigh Bardugo

Happy we were then, for we had a good house, and good food, and good work. There was nothing to do outside at night, except chapel, or choir, or penny-readings, sometimes. But even so, we always found plenty to do until bedtime, for if we were not studying or reading, then we were making something out back, or over the mountain singing somewhere. I can remember no time when there was not plenty to be done.
I wonder what has happened in fifty years to change it all ... But when people stop being friends with their mother and fathers, and itching to be out of the house, and going mad for other things to do, I cannot think. It is like an asthma, that comes on a man quickly. He has no notion how he had it, but there it is, and nothing can cure it. — Richard Llewellyn

Every night, half an hour before curtain up, the bells of St. Malachy's, the Actors' Chapel on New York's 49th Street, peal the tune of 'There's No Business Like Show Business.' If you walk the streets of the theatre district before a show and see the vast, enthusiastic lines it sounds like a calling: there is certainly no place like Broadway. — Dan Stevens

Be Willing to Pay the Price If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all. MICHELANGELO Renaissance sculptor and painter who spent 4 years lying on his back painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel Behind every great achievement is a story of education, training, practice, discipline, and sacrifice. You have to be willing to pay the price. Maybe that price is pursuing one single activity while putting everything else in your life on hold. Maybe it's investing all of your own personal wealth or savings. Maybe it's the willingness to walk away from the safety of your current situation. But though many things are typically required to reach a successful outcome, the willingness to do what's required adds that extra dimension to the mix that helps you persevere in the face of overwhelming challenges, setbacks, pain, and even personal — Jack Canfield

We can have open and good discussion with our Republican brothers and sisters. But when we walk into the chapel we should leave our political differences out in the parking lot. — Scott Howell

The simple yet holy atmosphere of the Chapel of the Holy Cross moves many to pray. Light a candle inside the chapel and offer the sincerest prayer in your heart. No matter where you choose to pray, the following will help you.
Presence:
Peace:
Alighment:
Sincerity:
Constancy:
Gratitude: — Ilchi Lee

When Headmaster Conrady pointed out the white clapboard chapel, I wondered whether there might be at least one structure with a softer name, like Church of the Good Shepherd or Chapel of the Non-Weapon-Bearing Angels. No such luck. Armistice Chapel was a place of peace, but only if you signed the treaty and sat at attention. — Clare Vanderpool

They didn't need to say it out loud to make it true. — Janey Chapel

But these vague whisperings may arise from Mr. Snagsby's being, in his way, rather a meditative and poetical man; loving to walk in Staple Inn in the summer time; and to observe how countrified the sparrows and the leaves are ... and to remark (if in good spirits) that there were old times once, and that you'd find a stone coffin or two, now, under that chapel, he'd be bound, if you was to dig for it. — Charles Dickens

If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they'd be making Avatar, not painting a chapel. — Banksy

Factory windows are always broken
Other windows are let alone.
No one throws through the chapel-window
The bitter, snarling, derisive stone. — Vachel Lindsay

I was born in 1970 in Illinois, but all the life I remember I've spent in Chapel Hill, N.C. — Sarah Dessen

People who prefer e-books ... think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel. — Joe Queenan

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university. — Russell Banks

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper's, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day's head into the base motor pool. — Ben Fountain

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells. — Ralph Ellison

I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room. — Laura Esquivel

I don't know what 'my way' is. Everybody keeps telling me I got all these things. I read the other day where I had magical powers. I told everybody in the chapel 'zap, zap, zap, zap!' I said 'Where's my magical powers at?' Well, you can't believe what you read in the press. I ain't got no magical powers or mystical trips or anything like that. It's kind of silly. — Charles Manson

Even Proust - there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so - the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because - the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times. — Donna Tartt

Certainly the affirmative pursuit of one's convictions about the ultimate mystery of the universe and man's relation to it is placed beyond the reach of law. Government may not interfere with organized or individual expressions of belief or disbelief. Propagation of belief - or even of disbelief - in the supernatural is protected, whether in church or chapel, mosque or synagogue, tabernacle or meeting-house. — Felix Frankfurter

Damn. Not even joined yet and you're already using the headache excuse. — Jacquelyn Frank

Hugo and I sat together in the chapel and didn't say a word to each other. We'd already said them all, in better times and in better places. — Craig Lancaster

The broken pink pillars, in the half-light, might have been waiting to fall down on him: the pool, covered with green scum, its steps torn away and hanging by one rotting clamp, to close over his head. The shattered evil-smelling chapel, overgrown with weeds, the crumbling walls, splashed with urine, on which scorpions lurked - wrecked entablature, sad archivolt, slippery stones covered with excreta - this place, where love had once brooded, seemed part of a nightmare. — Malcolm Lowry

Watching him watching his hands, I figured I could ask him to build me a model of the Sistine Chapel with miniature true to life detailing then a shed we could display it in, advertise it and sell tickets and he would have said, Works for me. — Kristen Ashley

The remains of five thousand monks were used to build the Chapel of Bones. It serves as a reminder that life is short and death is eternal. — Rick Riordan

Ah! you are come, are you, Edgar Linton?' she said, with angry animation. 'You are one of those things that are ever found when least wanted, and when you are wanted, never! I suppose we shall have plenty of lamentations now - I see we shall - but they can't keep me from my narrow home out yonder: my resting-place, where I'm bound before spring is over! There it is: not among the Lintons, mind, under the chapel-roof, but in the open air, with a head-stone; and you may please yourself whether you go to them or come to me! — Emily Bronte

Similarly, when we denigrate our bodies - whether through neglect or staring at our faces and counting up our flaws - we are belittling a sacred site, a worship space more wonderous than the most glorious, ancient cathedral. We are standing before the Grand Canyon or the Sistine Chapel and rolling our eyes. — Tish Harrison Warren

Anything of a serious nature isn't "instant" - you can't "do" the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God's sake? — Jonathan Cott

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing.
If one could drown in the grass ... it might be the best way to die. — Gregory Maguire

unspoken bond existed between the residents of Chapel Isle. The island was the same as the nets its fishermen cast at sea, a tight lattice of people tied by lives lived closely, knotted by friendship. Being here meant Abigail could become a part of that net as well, which was — Ellen Block

Whatever the answer, one senses one thing clearly: the man from whose mind this chaotic vision emanated did not purchase his "outlook on life" in a dime store, but came into this chapel like a meteor and left behind him the smell of cosmic sulphur...And century after century men come here bleating like goats, staring wide eyed at these testimonies of human passion and intelligence... — Miroslav Krleza

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it — Julie Orringer

Love? Do I love? I walk
Within the brilliance of another's thought,
As in a glory. I was dark before,
as Venus' chapel in the black of night:
But there was something holy in the darkness,
Softer and not so thick as the other where;
And as rich moonlight may be to the blind,
Unconsciously consoling. Then love came,
Like the out-bursting of a trodden star. — Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks to the asphalt drives lined with whitewashed stones, those cryptic messages for men and women, boys and girls heading quietly toward where the visitors waited, and we moving not in the mood of worship but of judgement; as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky, here, alive with looping swifts and darting moths, here in the hereness of the night not yet lighted by the moon that looms blood-red behind the chapel like a fallen sun, its radiance shedding not upon the here-dusk of twittering bats, nor on the there-night of cricket and whippoorwill, but focused short-rayed upon our place of convergence; and we drifting forward with rigid motions, limbs stiff and voices now silent, as though on exhibit even in the dark, and the moon a white man's bloodshot eye. — Ralph Ellison

I wasn't afraid of you, Alina. I was afraid of losing you. That girl you were becoming didn't need me anymore, but she's who you were always meant to be."
"Power hungry? Ruthless?"
"Strong." He looked away. "Luminous. And maybe a little ruthless too. That's what it takes to rule. Ravka is broken, Alina. I think it always has been. The girl I saw in the chapel could change that. — Leigh Bardugo

The suburban evening was grey and yellow on Sunday; the gardens of the small houses to left and right were rank with ivy and tall grass and lilac bushes; the tropical South London verdure was dusty above and mouldy below; the tepid air swarmed with flies. Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramaphones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station. — T. S. Eliot

Some who were not yet ready to venture into the chapel on Sundays might well put in their first appearance on a Saturday night to see what Y dyn bach ('the little man') had got to say. (The Welsh term has an element of affection in it not obvious in the English) — Iain H. Murray

Consummation Of Grief

I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .
it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead. — Charles Bukowski

When I'm building my dome in my chapel, and I had a vision - I've worked on perpetual motion and I haven't never give it up yet. I still think it could be done, perpetual motion. I had a vision of a un resist able windmill. — Howard Finster

Could five hundred men have painted the Sistine Chapel? — Bill Lear