Quote collection
647 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done."
"I also learned that you didn’t come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren’t born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose-paid but good. It is now your turn to reap."
"If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in."
"Grief is just so scary.... If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That's what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn't get dinner."
"Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we're invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence."
"Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation."
"No" is a complete sentence."
"To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are."
"I don't know much, but I understand how entirely doomed I am without God."
"You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness."
"I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced."
"The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable."
"As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society."
"You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes."
"You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course."
"This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period."
"Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you."
"And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen."
"Every time I see the bumper sticker that says “We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,” I (a) think it’s true and (b) want to ram the car."
"Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks."