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“Old is a cliché,” I tell them, with mock disappointment. “A terrible trivializing. An insult. I was born along with the sun and earth and moon and planets and all the stars. Every atom of my being was there at the very beginning.”
Open yourself to every possibility, for there is nothing your heart can imagine that is not so.
people are most afraid of things they don’t understand, and if something frightened you, you should get closer to it. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t still be an awful thing, but the awful you knew was easier to handle than the awful you imagined.
I’ve always thought of her in the way I think of a precious gem: The beauty isn’t in the jewel itself, but in the way the light shines through it.
Love comes in so many forms, and pain is no different.
Everything that’s been done to us we carry forever. Most of us do our damnedest to hold on to the good and forget the rest. But somewhere in the vault of our hearts, in a place our brains can’t or won’t touch, the worst is stored, and the only sure key to it is in our dreams.
God’s right here. In the dirt, the rain, the sky, the trees, the apples, the stars in the cottonwoods. In you and me, too. It’s all connected and it’s all God. Sure this is hard work, but it’s good work because it’s a part of what connects us to this land, Buck. This beautiful, tender land.”
The land is what it is. Life is what it is. God is what God is. You and me, we’re what we are. None of it’s perfect. Or, hell, maybe it all is and we’re just not wise enough to see it.”
LOSS COMES IN every moment. Second by second our lives are stolen from us. What is past will never come again.
Our former selves are never dead. We speak to them, arguing against decisions we know will bring only unhappiness, offering consolation and hope, even though they cannot hear.
We all have secrets. With them, we’re like squirrels with nuts. We hide them away, and bitter though they may be, we feed on them.
It began to feel to me as if what had been broken was coming together again, but I knew it would never be exactly the same. With every turn of the river, we were changing, becoming different people, and for the first time I understood that the journey we were on wasn’t just about getting to Saint Louis.
WE BREATHE LOVE in and we breathe love out. It’s the essence of our existence, the very air of our souls.
“In every sinner, Gertie, is the possibility of a saint.”
good things are made even better when you share the story of how they came to be.
We are creatures of spirit, I have come to believe, and this spirit runs through us like electricity and can be passed one to another.
“You’re a storyteller. You can create the world in any way your heart imagines.” “That won’t make it true.” “Maybe the universe is one grand story, and who says that it can’t be changed in the telling?”
THERE IS A river that runs through time and the universe, vast and inexplicable, a flow of spirit that is at the heart of all existence, and every molecule of our being is a part of it. And what is God but the whole of that river?
I would love to be able to call out to him and tell him in a kindly way that reason will do him no good, that it’s pointless to rail about the difficulty of the twists in that river, and that he shouldn’t worry about where the current will take him,
Perhaps the most important truth I’ve learned across the whole of my life is that it’s only when I yield to the river and embrace the journey that I find peace.
Of all that we’re asked to give others in this life, the most difficult to offer may be forgiveness.
if you tell a story, it’s like sending a nightingale into the air with the hope that its song will never be forgotten.
A woman who can heal the afflicted? A girl who looks into the future and wrestles with what she sees there? Yet are these things more difficult to accept than that all of existence came out of a single, random moment when cosmic gases exploded?
Our eyes perceive so dimly, and our brains are so easily confused. Far better, I believe, to be like children and open ourselves to every beautiful possibility, for there is nothing our hearts can imagine that is not so.
