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“Our life is what our thoughts make it.” —Marcus Aurelius,
The writer Michael Crichton said, “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything.
You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”
“Thistle House is for people who love and care for one another. We respect
We carry one another’s burdens. We weep for one another and we laugh with one another. We hold one another by the hand when the lights go out and when the way seems hopeless. We work together and we share the table together and we pray together. No matter how old we are or what we are called.”
But life is lived at the moment you are living it, she thought. No one but God in heaven has the benefit of seeing beyond today. In the
“I am saying, when you make a choice, even if it’s a bad one, you’ve played your hand. You cannot live your life as though you still held all your cards.”
am not such a significant creature in God’s universe that it is my decisions alone that can change the destiny of another.
We make our choices—you and I—in a world that isn’t perfect. And while I wish I had made different choices, as
know you do, which one of us can say that if we had, nothing bad would have ever happen...
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memories have no power but what I allow them.
Fear is worse than pain, I think. Pain is centralized, identifiable, and wanes as you wait. Fear is a heaviness you can’t wriggle out from under. You must simply find the will to stand with it and start walking. Fear does not start to fade until you take the step that you think you can’t.
Fear is not only a leaden foe, but a liar as well. It was not as bad as I thought it would be, sitting there
in a London department store on an ordinary Saturday.
Everyone has good days and bad days, Dr. Bristol told me.
me truth is a strange companion. It devastates one moment and enthralls the next. But it never deceives. And because of that, in the end, it comforts.
but if I know anything about time, it is that it stretches to walk with you when you grieve.
The rest of the world may zoom past at breakneck speed, but when you are learning to live with loss, time slows to the pace of your breathing.
They made choices, some good, some bad. Just like I did. And then they had to live with those choices, just as I had to live with mine. And as you will have to live with yours.”
understand there are no secrets to a charmed life. There is just the simple truth that you must forgive yourself for only being able to make your own choices, and no one else’s.”
Sages of the past would say we are—all of us—just imperfect people on a flawed planet who are trying to hold on to what is good and lovely and right.
It’s easy to miss all the amazing things that come your way if you are chasing only the dream, and that’s all you see or want. I think Emmy comes to realize this by the novel’s end.
of what you have dreamed of, chased after, and achieved, but rather whom you poured your life into, who poured their life into yours, and the difference you’ve made in the lives of others. Most of the dreams we pursue don’t have intrinsic worth, but people always do. It’s not a perfect world, and we can only play our own hand of cards—if you will—but if we play the hand as best we can, with love for others as the motivation, I think we can rest content.
