Sheila > Sheila's Quotes

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“Children are happy because they don't have a file in their minds called "All the Things That Could Go Wrong.”
― Marianne Williamson

“No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“If thou of fortune be bereft,
and in thy store there be but left
two loaves, sell one, and with the
dole, buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier

“If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.”
― Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

“In good company your thoughts run, in solitude your thought is still; it goes deeper and makes for itself a deeper groove, delves. Delve meansa 'dig with a spade'; it means hard work. In talk your mind can be stretched, widened, exhilarated to heights but it cannot be deepened; you have to deepen it yourself.

It needs sturdiness. You will be lonely, you will be depressed; you must expect it; if you were training your body it would ache and be tired. It is worth it. There is a Hindu proverb which says: 'You only grow when you are alone'.”
― Rumer Godden, Thus Far and No Further

“When you walk to the edge of all the light you have and take that first step into the darkness of the unknown, you must believe that one of two things will happen:

There will be something solid for you to stand upon, or, you will be taught to fly.”
― Patrick Overton, The Leaning Tree

“...you are my rainbow to keep. My eyes will always be watching you; never will I lose sight of you.”
― Vesna Bailey

“There are people who cannot say good-bye
They are born this way/this is how they die
They are the keepers of promises/what moves them does not wear out
Their loyalty will tear apart your clocks

These are the people who can hear the music in songs
They are the Vow carriers
The grandmothers who always leave the porchlight on
No one is lost to the one who sees

These are the women widowed by men they never married
These are the girls who wait even when you don't come
These are the mothers of orphans/They can turn a fake into an original
They will hear the prayer in your self-contempt

As distance is measured/people do not end
It is one of those stories that cannot be written down except across a lifetime of open doors
There is a holding on beyond the letting go
There is a reunion in everybody's chest
This is how we come to make a family from strangers
This is how we light candles

These are people who will remember you when you meet them
These are the people you can always call at night
They are humans turned angels by your asking
With each separation they go to seed again.

These are the men who carried you on their shoulders
This is the one your are lonely for
the one who begins and ends your hunger
This is the man who said "Always"

There is something that does not wear out
It is the third part of any two people who join
It opens and closes

There are people who are alone who are not apart
This is why we listen to the madman when he speaks
People change but they do not stop
This is how we learn "Forever"

There are people you can count on/They are the keepers of promises
They are candles lit from each other
They can teach us eternity
We can get what we can give/This is the instruction
There are people who do not say goodbye
As distance is measured
You are one of them”
― Merrit Malloy, The People Who Didn't Say Goodbye

“When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.

And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give to them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.

Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live in your eyes
And not on your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands
By letting
Bodies touch bodies
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away”
― Merrit Malloy

“In a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space. So this afternoon, I'll walk to the library.”
― Anne Lamott

“He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In!”
― Edwin Markham

“The key to the seeker’s quest is not in finding just the right piece of holy real estate on which to stand, but rather in so preparing his or her awareness that any space he or she occupies can become thin through faith.”
― Steven Charleston, Four Vision Quests of Jesus

“of God in my life. I surrender my mind, my heart, my need for safety, and my need for rational explanations and orderly instructions to God’s will for me. I trust that all that is in my life is as it should be. I release”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“When God takes out the trash, don't go digging back through it. Trust Him.”
― Amaka Imani Nkosazana, Heart Crush

“Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”
― Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, A Life For A Life

“A loud voice cannot compete with a clear voice, even if it's a whisper.”
― Barry Neil Kaufman

“I have a different theory, which is even more harebrained. It goes like this: Maybe we should all just love one another, even if we don't completely understand the things that people bear in their dark, strange hearts, even if the stars that other men and women are following seem invisible to us. If we make ourselves open to the humanity of others first, maybe understanding will follow. An incomprehensible theory of the universe isn't necessary if your only ambition is to embrace another soul. What you need, maybe all you need, in fact, is the willingness to love.”
― Jennifer Finney Boylan, Long Black Veil

“I think it's very human, the hope that an all-encompassing love will change us into someone else, someone better. That this hope usually turns out to be false makes it no less human; the world is full of hopes far more unlikely than being transformed by love.”
― Jennifer Finney Boylan, Long Black Veil

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“Dear Human:
You've got it all wrong.

You didn't come here to master unconditional love. This is where you came from and where you'll return.

You came here to learn personal love.
Universal love.
Messy love.
Sweaty Love.
Crazy love.
Broken love.
Whole love.
Infused with divinity.
Lived through the grace of stumbling.
Demonstrated through the beauty of... messing up.
Often.

You didn't come here to be perfect, you already are.

You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.

And rising again into remembering.

But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.

Love in truth doesn't need any adjectives.
It doesn't require modifiers.
It doesn't require the condition of perfection.

It only asks you to show up.
And do your best.
That you stay present and feel fully.
That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU.

Its enough.

It's Plenty.”
― Courtney A. Walsh

“I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“—and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility