Top 140 Jan Karon Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “We took the parkway to Linville Falls, 221 to Marion, then I-40 here. The Alleluia Highway, we decided to call it.”

— Jan Karon

102. “There’s nothing trite about being consoled in a world that does everything in its power to deliver sorrow.”

— Jan Karon

103. “Perhaps, he thought, we should all live as if we’re dying.”

— Jan Karon

104. “So here is what my advice would be: If God has given you a dream, you’d better get cracking because He wants you to use it. That’s why He gives them to us in the first place.”

— Jan Karon

105. “Mitford would simply like to be the pause that refreshes.’”

— Jan Karon

106. “Well, I think some people are very happy in retirement. And in a year and a half I’m going to see how happy I feel in retirement. I’m just going to not work quite so hard, but I’ll continue to write as long as God gives me breath.”

— Jan Karon

107. “Cynics will say there are no good people out there. And if you read the papers and watch TV news you could be convinced of that. But there are good people.”

— Jan Karon

108. “I have raced against the clock since I went into advertising at the age of eighteen.”

— Jan Karon

109. “Many things I have tried to grasp, and have lost. That which I have placed in God’s hands I still have. – Martin Luther.”

— Jan Karon

110. “That was his favorite thing about books – they took you off to other people’s lives an’ places, but you could still set in your own chair by th’ oil heater, warm as a mouse in a churn.”

— Jan Karon

111. “Pray, that’s what we can do, have done, are doing, and will do. Out of our hands.”

— Jan Karon

112. “There are two things to aim at in life,’ ” he quoted from Logan Pearsall Smith. “ ‘First, to get what you want, and after that, to enjoy it.”

— Jan Karon

113. “His style was to give the issue to God and haul it back again, ad infinitum, ’til the cows came home, until the thing finally wore itself out in him.”

— Jan Karon

114. “Publishing is, by its nature, about deadlines, and deadlines are toxic.”

— Jan Karon

115. “He liked familiar things, things that had been worn in by good people, people he could trust.”

— Jan Karon

116. “I really care about my readers. I care about anyone who reads my books.”

— Jan Karon

117. “My work is awfully labored just now. Sometimes it has the most wondrous life of its own, it fairly pulls me along – rather like wind surfing! At other times, it drags and mopes, so that I despair of ever writing another word or drawing another picture. I’ve found that if one keeps pushing along during the mopes, out will flash the most exhilarating thought or idea – a way of doing something that I had never seen before – and then, one is off again, and hold on to your hat!”

— Jan Karon

118. “Why can’t life always be lived under the stars,′ she said, ’with great music and family and friends?”

— Jan Karon

119. “I learned not to be so bitterly defeated when my fiction took a beating from editors. I learned in advertising to color in the lines and have my work done on time and to make it the very best it could be.”

— Jan Karon

120. “Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a book.”

— Jan Karon

121. “Maybe it’s because he never had any control over what was happening to him as a boy. Being late was somehow a way of taking charge.”

— Jan Karon

122. “A small parish is a fragile ecology.”

— Jan Karon

123. “Lord,” he said aloud, “I’m not going to pray, I only want to listen. Why does Dooley turn away from us?”

— Jan Karon

124. “He tucked her in with a quote from Victor Hugo. ‘“Sleep in peace, God is awake.”

— Jan Karon

125. “I think you could say I came to the end of myself. I really did want a show all my own, and he had to hammer me pretty hard to make me see that it was all his. We don’t like relinquishing the power we never had anyway, even though running the show ourselves never works. I surrendered everything to him. What did I have to lose?”

— Jan Karon

126. “Soon, he wanted to preach on personal, as compared to institutional, salvation. Confessing Christ before others was an act of institutional salvation that most churchgoers had done long ago. He wanted to get at something more compelling, more life-changing-the process of personal confession, of personal relationship with Christ. He also wanted to point out that being a priest no more assured him of heaven than being a chipmunk would assure him of nuts for winter.”

— Jan Karon

127. “My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.”

— Jan Karon

128. “The windows were open to morning air embroidered with birdsong.”

— Jan Karon

129. “Let us weigh the gain and the loss, wagering that God is. Consider these alternatives – if you win, you win all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate, then, to wager that he is.”

— Jan Karon

130. “Let me say that I absolutely loved writing ‘A Common Life,’ because it was a book about love.”

— Jan Karon

131. “Charles Spurgeon had said, “Christianity rests upon the fact that Christ is risen from the dead, His sovereignty depends upon His resurrection.”

— Jan Karon

132. “There are so many people who don’t know small towns exist. When I write, I want to give my readers two things: one is a sense of consolation, and two, I want to make them laugh.”

— Jan Karon

133. “His feelings of panic had passed once before; it would pass again, he told himself. He must go forward on faith, not feeling.”

— Jan Karon

134. “Yet in all this, she was to trust God – and more than that, yes, truly more than that, she was to thank him.”

— Jan Karon

135. “It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

— Jan Karon

136. “If God puts you there, He is amply sufficient.”

— Jan Karon

137. “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person,” Pascal wrote. “And it can never be filled by any created thing. It can only be filled by God, made known through Jesus Christ.”

— Jan Karon

138. “Though we don’t do it often enough, it’s easy to have a grateful heart for food and shelter, love and hope, health and peace. But what about the hard stuff, the stuff that darkens your world and wounds you to the quick? Just what is this everything business? “It’s the hook. It’s the key. Everything is the word on which this whole powerful command stands and has its being.”

— Jan Karon

139. “When we receive the bread and blood, we, also, are touching God... I know you recognize that wonderous fact, dear brother, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded.”

— Jan Karon

140. “Some have been in church all their lives and have never known this mighty, marvelous, and yet simple personal relationship. Others believe that while such a relationship may be possible, it’s not for them – why would God want to bother with them, except from a very great distance? In reality, it is no bother to God at all. He wants this relationship far, far more than you and I want it, and I pray that you will ponder that marvelous truth.”

— Jan Karon

141. “In truth, Mitford is everywhere. You can even find it in the heart of darkness. But we must do our part. We must give a hand; we must learn to console and uplift and encourage and be courageous. Bottom line, we simply cannot wait for others to reach out. We must reach in.”

— Jan Karon