Jessie Weaver > Jessie's Quotes

“I think love is kind of like those waves out there," she said. "You ride one in to the beach, and it's the most amazing thing you've ever felt. But at some point the water goes back out; it has to. And maybe you're lucky-maybe you're both too busy to do anything drastic. Maybe you're good as friends, so you stay. And then something happens-maybe it's something as big as a baby, or as small as him unloading the dishwasher-and the wave comes back in again. And it does that, over and over. I just think sometimes people forget to wait.”
― Erica Bauermeister, Joy for Beginners

“Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

“Because you will never, ever have the life God’s planned for you as long as you’re holding on to that fear. You can’t swim to shore if you never let go of that life preserver.”
― Jenny B. Jones, Just Between You and Me: A Novel of Losing Fear and Finding God

“Your home needs to be a place where your kids can fail—and learn from their failure. Surround them with love, show them how important they are to you, but don’t try to undo their failures. It’s not our job as parents to get our kids off the hook.”
― Kevin Leman, Making Children Mind without Losing Yours

“Whenever a group of people who are designed to primarily unite around one thing try to unite around something else, the result is devastating for all.”
― Rob Tims, Southern Fried Faith: How the Bible Belt Confuses Christ and Culture

“Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Kittens were in continual abundance on the farm, there was a kind of kitten currency in the neighborhood, they were bartered for all kinds of emotional regret or fulfillment by parents - a doll lost, an exam passed.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Women have shown that they truly can do anything. But the statistics are strikingly different for women with children. When a woman has her first child, the wage gap between men and women opens. David Leonhardt of The Atlantic argues that the real problem in the workplace isn’t sexism, it’s momism, because women do great in the workplace until they have kids. Why? In a nutshell, when forced to choose between family and work, women choose family. And in the past, women were forced to make this choice.”
― Anne Bogel, How She Does It: An Everywoman's Guide to Breaking Old Rules, Getting Creative, and Making Time for Work in Your Actual, Everyday Life

“I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.”
― Maeve Binchy

“90 percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head.”
― Jonathan Acuff, Quitter: Closing the Gap Between Your Day Job and Your Dream Job

“Irreversible decisions are good for the soul, word lady.”
― Erica Bauermeister, Joy for Beginners

“The cold reality of it had struck her, as if, perched on the crest of a roller coaster, the rest of the ride was suddenly, irreversibly clear. On the way up, the vista had been infinite, the time to look about sometimes agonizingly long; now there was only the certain and dispassionate knowledge that there was one set of rails on which to travel, the ending immutable and about to begin. It didn't matter that the rest of the trip might take twenty, even thirty years to complete; the angle of the ride had changed.”
― Erica Bauermeister, Joy for Beginners

“It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“Love is like mud. Only as strong as the shape you give it. Love is like paint. It can color over all the empty places. If you drop it, Love will break you.”
― Rachel Keener, The Memory Thief: A Novel

“The things a mother does well are always invisible compared to the things she does badly.”
― Amy Wilson, When Did I Get Like This?: The Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget-Buyer, and Other Mothers I Swore I'd Never Be

“Although things seem to be falling apart, even now, in the midst of our worst disarray, the Lord is working to make them fall together for our future good.”
― Tessa Afshar, Harvest Of Gold

“Death is the most ordinary thing in the world, and so is birth. Someone is being born at this very moment. Someone is dying. Ordinary, and yet completely extraordinary. The marvel of having my babies is something I will never forget. The feeling of staggering uniqueness I had at the death of my father, the death of several close friends, was very different, but equally acute. Death may be an ordinary, everyday affair, but it is not a statistic. It is something that happens to people.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention

“Okay, I’m just going to come right out and say it: A lot of women secretly hate Christmas. Now, don’t get me wrong. We love that picturesque moment in which the tree is lit, the fire is crackling, and children outfitted in matching candy-cane pajamas dance around the living room to Tchaikovsky, showing off armfuls of new toys while a twenty-pound ham bakes in the oven; we just hate the anxiety disorder we developed while attempting to produce it.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

“As I saw how powerful and affirming this ancient blessing could be, I decided it was time for Christian women to take back Proverbs 31. Somewhere along the way, we surrendered it to the same people who invented airbrushing and Auto-Tune and Rachel Ray. We abandoned the meaning of the poem by focusing on the specifics, and it became just another impossible standard by which to measure our failures. We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

“Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way—perhaps in that middle—we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“There’s so much I want for her that sometimes I think the seams of my skin aren’t enough to contain every hope I have. And I whisper it to her all the time. When I’m feeding her. When she’s asleep in my arms. When we are playing at the park. I whisper all the everything I know she can be and the ways I’ll fight for her to be them. I want her to know her entire life her mommy may not have had a powerful job or made millions, but that her moms did everything so that she could be an accumulation of the best dreams.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, With the Fire on High

“And besides, everyone knows Superman is in love with Batman. Even though someone decided their ship name should be SuperBat rather than the golden opportunity that is ManMan.”
― T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries

“Dickensian poverty tends to occur after Christmas in January. For it is then, with pockets empty, diary decimated and larder bare, that the general populace sinks into a collective pauper's hibernation until Valentine's Day.”
― Stewart Stafford

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Nope, I said to myself while climbing into bed and switching off the light, there is no kindness in any of that. For kindness begins where necessity ends.”
― Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

“As Emmett walked out the door and climbed into his bright yellow car, I thought to myself that there are surely a lot of big things in America. The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty are big. The Mississippi River and the Grand Canyon are big. The skies over the praries are big. But there is nothing bigger than a man's opinion of himself.”
― Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

“I was never like the rest of you, making plans about the great things I'd do, I never saw myself as anything much, just shy, stupid little Beth, who's only use was at home. Why does everyone want to go away? I love being home, but I don't like being left behind. Now I'm the one going ahead, No one can stop God if He wants me, But I'm afraid I shall be homesick for you... even in heaven.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“The tenth lesson of wizard training is to pay attention to warning signals in your life. Become alert to what the universe is trying to point you away from. If you can wake up fast enough, certain tragedies (though not all) can be avoided. And for those times when you don't manage to wake up fast enough, be kind to yourself in the storm that will follow.”
― Echo Brown, Black Girl Unlimited

“I SWEAR SOMETIMES

it feels like God be flashing photos of his children, awkward, amazing, tucked in his wallet for the world to see. But the world don't wanna see no kids, and God ain't no pushy parent so he just folds and snaps us shut.”
― Jason Reynolds, Long Way Down

“I hated lateness. Being late is a selfish habit adopted by boring people in search of a personality quirk who can't be bothered to take up an instrument”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts