Gillian Marchenko > Gillian's Quotes

“The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little. ”
― Anne Lamott

“A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into doing so, I taste only shame. I have an eating disorder.”
― Jena Morrow, Hollow: An Unpolished Tale

“I know of other mothers who have children with disabilities,and right away they loved them and decided to fight for them.
That isn’t my story.”
― Gillian Marchenko, Sun Shine Down: A Memoir

“Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.”
― Gillian Marchenko, Sun Shine Down: A Memoir

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”
― Annie Dillard

“When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I’ll have a book.”
― Betsy Byars, The Moon and I

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
― Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

“Our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strengths.”
― C. H. Spurgeon

“If Christ is not all to you He is nothing to you. He will never go into partnership as a part Saviour of men. If He be something He must be everything, and if He be not everything He is nothing to you.”
― Charles Spurgeon

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“Light existed all along. Of course it did. Who says it didn't because I couldn't see it?”
― Gillian Marchenko, Still Life: A Memoir of Living Fully with Depression

“I may not be the best mom. I may not even get back to being the average mother I once claimed to be. But I'm here. I'm getting back up. I'm not leaving. And I'm the mom God ordained for these fours souls, and therefore I am their best mom.”
― Gillian Marchenko, Still Life: A Memoir of Living Fully with Depression

“Having to admit that you are depressed makes one feel less than. Broken. Yes, that's what it is. Broken.”
― Gillian Marchenko, Still Life: A Memoir of Living Fully with Depression