Beth > Beth's Quotes

“Spend a long time alone, especially if you're someone who's never been that social to begin with, and you find yourself craving solitude.”
― Ron Rash, Above the Waterfall

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair

“In the aftermath of loss, we do what we’ve always done, although we are changed, maybe more afraid. We do what we can, as well as we can. My pastor, Veronica, one Sunday told the story of a sparrow lying in the street with its legs straight up in the air, sweating a little under its feathery arms. A warhorse walks up to the bird and asks, “What on earth are you doing?” The sparrow replies, “I heard the sky was falling, and I wanted to help.” The horse laughs a big, loud, sneering horse laugh, and says, “Do you really think you’re going to hold back the sky, with those scrawny little legs?” And the sparrow says, “One does what one can.” So what can I do? Not much. Mother Teresa said that none of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love. This reminder has saved me many times.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

“But what if the great secret insider-trading truth is that you don’t ever get over the biggest losses in your life? Is that good news, bad news, or both? The good news is that if you don’t seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever. This is also the bad news, not because your heart will continue to hurt forever, but because grief is so frowned upon, so hard for even intimate bystanders to witness, that you will think you must be crazy for not getting over it. You”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

“Alone, we are doomed, but by the same token, we’ve learned that people are impossible, even the ones we love most—especially the ones we love most: they’re damaged, prickly and set in their ways.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

“Laughter is deliverance, bubbly salvation.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

“Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair

“When you love something like reading—or drawing or music or nature—it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

“Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water. I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. I so resent this.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

“Say it's true: It is what it is. We're social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair

“While it is hard to fathom who we are and how we are to live when public chaos shatters our routine, the slow-motion pain of each private death and cataclysm we endure is harder. Each slams us off our feet, yet we have agreed to pretend to be fine again at some point, ideally as soon as possible, so as not to seem self-indulgent or embarrass anybody. Then people can get on with their lives.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

“The pain does grow less acute, but the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

“When you can step back at moments like these and see what is happening, when you watch people you love under fire or evaporating, you realize that the secret of life is patch patch patch. Thread your needle, make a knot, find one place on the other piece of torn cloth where you can make one stitch that will hold. And do it again. And again. And again.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair

“It can be too sad here. We so often lose our way.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair

“What if you wake up at sixty and realize that you forgot to wake up, and you never became the person you were born to be, and now your hair is falling out?”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

“Thus it is that my friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges, and enabled me to walk serene and happy in the shadow cast by my deprivation.”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

“When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“You'll be devastated and grief-stricken, but there's a place in you that is inviolate-it's the surest part of you, a piece of Sophia herself. You'll find your way there, when you need to. And you'll know then what I speak of.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU SO DESPERATELY SEEK”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, Aethon saw that the cities on both sides of the page, the dark ones and the bright ones, were one and the same, that there is no peace without war, no life without death, and he was afraid.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Why can't healing happen as quickly as wounding?”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you. He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land