Heather > Heather's Quotes

“When we no longer pray, no longer listen to the voice of love that speaks to us in the moment, our lives become absurd lives in which we are thrown back and forth between the past and the future. If we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully where we are, we would indeed discover that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love”
― Henri Nouwen

“Love yourself and others, appreciate beauty, art and music, laugh as often as possible, empathize with others’ pain so that it may be diminished even if only for a moment, appreciate the flavors and textures of a finely cooked meal, let a cool breeze caress your skin on a warm summer night and drift off to a peaceful sleep. Thank”
― Cameron West, First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple

“Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you some much that I don't care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, 'No toffee now. But when you've grown up and don't really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose'?

If I knew that to be eternally divided from H. and eternally forgotten by her would add a greater joy and splendour to her being, of course I'd say 'Fire ahead.' Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by never seeing her again, I'd have arranged never to see her again. I'd have had to. Any decent person would. But that's quite different. That's not the situation I'm in.

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“Because I kept fucking up, because it seemed so hard to not fuck up, I lived a life where I had less than what I desired. So instead of wanting more, sometimes I just made myself want even less. Sometimes I made myself believe that I wanted nothing.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“I wasn’t destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“That was how I’d always imagined the surface of my heart—smooth, slick, unattached. Nothing to grab on to. Unscored. No one could attach to me once the inevitable heat of life bore down. I suspected the metaphor went deeper still—that I was afraid of marring my heart with the scoring that arose naturally between people, the inevitable bumping against other people’s desires, demands, pettiness, preferences, and all the quotidian negotiations that made up a relationship. Scoring was required for attachment, and my heart lacked the grooves.”
― Christie Tate, Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life

“my terror about other people’s anger was yet another stumbling block to intimacy.”
― Christie Tate, Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life

“Remember, love that doesn't include honesty doesn't deserve to be called love.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“We are made up of different parts, some good, some bad, and a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time. Mental illness is precisely about a lack of this kind of integration - we end up losing contact with the unacceptable parts of ourselves.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“...we often mistake love for fireworks - for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It's boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm - and constant.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. —SIGMUND FREUD”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“No matter what I do, no matter where I try to find joy, I instead find my trauma. And it whispers to me: “You will always be this way. It’s never going to change. I will follow you. I will make you miserable forever. And then I will kill you.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“Dr. Ham would tell me that PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace. The whole point of PTSD is to prepare you for being on the verge of death at any moment. My parents prepared me to face a vicious world with danger around every corner.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“Hatred, I learned quickly, was the antidote to sadness. It was the only safe feeling. Hatred does not make you cry at school. It isn’t vulnerable. Hatred is efficient. It does not grovel. It is pure power.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“It made perfect sense to me later in life when I discovered that the Chinese word for endurance is simply the word knife on top of the word heart. You walk around with a knife in your heart. You do it with stoicism. This is the apex of being.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“Getting your feelings hurt is not an offense. Feeling ignorant around someone is not an offense. Being made angry is not an offense.”
― James B. Richards, How to Stop the Pain

“As mankind treats one another in destructive, self-centered ways, we create emotional wounds that make people afraid to love and trust. And the less we feel loved, the more pain we inflict upon each other. Thus the ever-growing cycle continues on, and pain abounds.”
― James B. Richards, How to Stop the Pain

“This was one of the pleasures of recovery: you opened the door to the pain and gnawing tedium, but joy came in as well. All of it, all of it, brilliant and clean and true.”
― Amanda Eyre Ward, The Jetsetters

“It was only recently that she was beginning to admit to herself how much it hurt to have to be fine.”
― Amanda Eyre Ward, The Jetsetters

“It’s a particularly strange kind of loss, when something you don’t think you even want gets taken away from you.”
― Jennifer E. Smith, The Unsinkable Greta James

“Maybe the point isn't always to make things last. Maybe it's just to make them count.”
― Jennifer E. Smith, The Unsinkable Greta James

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning