Heidi > Heidi's Quotes

“Our children live or die with or without us. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It is a devastating realization, but also liberating. I finally chose life for myself.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“there with dirt on her hands, smiling from ear to ear. Being a parent is so strange, all our children’s pain belongs to us, but so does their joy.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“You can be whatever you want to in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that. But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Isn’t it like, totally unbelievable that we even exist? So it won’t be a tragedy when we don’t exist anymore! It’s just cool, really cool, that we happened at all.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“The dinosaurs died out, but you and I and all these idiots managed to survive? We do nothing but try to find ways to destroy everything that’s keeping us alive, but we’re still here?”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“But there isn’t enough room. Art is what can’t fit inside a person. The things that bubble over,” Ted had said. “Sometimes you’re really smart,” the artist had replied.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Is it always that cold in the sea?” she wonders. “No. Sometimes it’s much colder,” he smiles. “I’ve never felt like this, my skin feels different…” “There’s nothing like the sea. Now your skin knows that. Now it’s going to miss it, always,” he promises.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“It’s incredibly difficult being a mom, Louisa. It’s difficult being a human being. I think my mom was very like me at first, because she was a romantic when she was young. But there’s no harder person on the planet than a romantic with a broken heart.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Ted explains that children know hardly anything about their parents, even if they live with them their whole lives. Because all we know about them is as moms and dads, nothing about who they were before that. We never saw them young, when they still fantasized about all the things that could happen, instead of regretting all the things that never did.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Is it horrible being an adult?” the girl asked. “Unbearable,” the mother replied. “You fail with almost everything, all the time.” “Not with lasagna,” the girl pointed out.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“It’s art that helps me cope. Because art is a fragile magic, just like love, and that’s humanity’s only defense against death. That we create and paint and dance and fall in love, that’s our rebellion against eternity. Everything beautiful is a shield. Vincent van Gogh wrote: ‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’ ”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“It is presented simply as a stark fact undermining absolutely any instinct, desire, sense of self, dream, feeling, perception, ambition, or inner truth. If you feel something at all… red flag. No to intuition. No to what your body knows. No to what your gut is telling you. No to what you want. No to any hunger. No to what feels right. No to what feels wrong. No to your deceitful, incurable heart.”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“With thoughts like these, I am in real danger of God’s disapproval or”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“want road trips and fresh summer peaches and sandy beaches and beautiful stories. I am positively breathless at the idea of love and longing and sex; being desired is seismic. I have some unnamed big hunger inside me—dreams or power or ambition or something—and I fantasize endlessly about becoming the sort of person who is worthy of it all. I want to live. I want to chase these desires straight into a gorgeous life. This is all so real in my bones. I don’t know how to tell God I love the world.”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“I contort my normal desires around a tyrannical gatekeeper in charge of my eternity. My prevailing hope is to become less, because my largeness threatens the enterprise. After all, God called us to holiness, not happiness. I know the system.”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“What if bewilderment at social choreography is the only true thing happening in the room? What if decorum doesn’t grease the machine but grinds it to a halt? I’ve never lived in a world where we all say what we actually mean and feel and think and believe and want. Maybe she is the one standing in integrity and the rest of us are just following the damn script.”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.O I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“This was when I learned that “what is true” mostly factors in when it benefits white, straight Christians. If it doesn’t, or more to the point, if it threatens the narrative, it will be instantly divorced from “what is right” and rebranded.”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?” I”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“I know the kind of wife I need and I become her: the one who will leave this earth at the same instant I do. I am my own bride”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“I Am Not Your Cup of Tea” I am not your cup of tea because I am made too strong and frankly”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“The church that raised me bears almost no resemblance to the one dehumanizing refugees”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“Church right now feels like my best friends”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“What if Mary Oliver is right and this is our one wild and precious life? What if we really don’t get any days back”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“Look”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“To witness a woman denying that she is beautiful is like watching someone set fire to an art museum. It’s like watching an angel drink gasoline. It’s like watching a Phoenix rip off its wings.”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“It is tempting to disparage the earlier versions of myself”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir

“I think the way we learn about history in classrooms is so antiseptic. It makes those struggles feel so far away”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface