rhoda janzen
Rhoda Janzen is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Mennonite in a Little Black Dress and the poetry collection Babel’s Stair. She teaches English and creative writing at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Rhoda Janzen holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was the University of California Poet Laureate in 1994 and 1997. She is the author of Babel's Stair, a collection of poems, and her poems have also appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Southern Review.
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“Granny panties. White as a flag, but with no surrender.”
rhoda janzen
“I'm not really a chicken-patty kinda girl," I said.”
rhoda janzen
“I've come to believe that virtue isn’t a condition of character. It’s an elected action. It’s a choice we keep making, over and over, hoping that someday we’ll create a habit so strong it will carry us through our bouts of pettiness and meanness.”
rhoda janzen
“When you're young, faith is often a matter of rules. What you should do and shouldn't do, that kind of thing. But as you get older, you realize that faith is really a matter of relationship - with God, with the people around you, with the members of your community.”
rhoda janzen
“It was after Nick had left me that I learned the lesson: its when you don't love somebody that you do notice the little things. Then you mind them. You mind them terribly.”
rhoda janzen
“Sometimes you can just feel a person's decency in the same way that sometimes you can intuit a lack of it. Phil had the air of a man who is fully attentively engaged Josh Hannah's first fiance had the air of a man trying not to look at his watch. Phil consistently interested himself in the lives of others Josh talked about himself. Phil looked at my sister with tenderness and humor Josh looked at her as if she were an especially persistent gnat.”
rhoda janzen
“Call me old-fashioned, but whenever I see those wire-fortified ribbons, I have the secret stab of nostalgia for old-timey ribbon, the kind whose ends flop like spaniel ears. I'm suspicious of unnaturally perky ribbon.”
rhoda janzen
“Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?”
rhoda janzen
“In my opinion, sexiness comes down to three things: chemistry, sense of humor, and treatment of waitstaff at restaurants.”
rhoda janzen
“I think maybe I'd still nod and smile and have lunch with him. I think maybe I'd still go to the Noam Chomsky documentary later that evening. And maybe I'd even marry him a couple of weeks later. Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?”
rhoda janzen
“Phil and Hannah had decided that Christian guilt was better than bad math”
rhoda janzen