Lori > Lori's Quotes

“I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don't want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift.”
― Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

“It's not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What's hard, she said, is figuring out what you're willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Unsure how to find grace and security in the complex world we’ve inherited, we try to fill up the spaces in our children’s lives with stuff: birthday entertainments, lessons, rooms full of toys and equipment, tutors and therapists. But material pleasures can’t buy peace of mind, and all the excess leads to more anxiety—parents fear that their children will not be able to sustain this rarefied lifestyle and will fall off the mountain the parents have built for them.”
― Wendy Mogel, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children

“Storytelling and personal narrative have the ability to reach the elusive millennial generation, the ones shoved out, marginalized, and made to feel “other” or “less than.” When you’re the one on the fringes, one of the most powerful things someone can say to you is, “Me too.” And really, it’s one of the most powerful things someone can say to anyone, regardless of status or social placement. The intrinsic value of mutual understanding and experience is immeasurable and priceless. Mutual understanding and sharing one’s experience are really just other ways to say “relationship.” Relationships are priceless, and relationships are built on stories shared.”
― Nish Weiseth, Speak: How Your Story Can Change the World

“Maybe you have to be really, really tired before you can answer questions like those. Maybe you have to be deeply discouraged by never having time for all the things that need doing in this world—not just the important things, like spending time with the people you love, taking care of your health, and engaging in purposeful work (paid or unpaid) that gives you a chance to participate in the repairing of the world, but also the minor but nonnegotiable things, like keeping up with the laundry, getting your oil changed, stocking the refrigerator with something other than fat-free yogurt and frozen pizza,”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Practice of Saying No: A HarperOne Select – A Spiritual Reflection on Sabbath-Keeping and Finding the Sacred in Everyday Life

“When my friend Matilda lay dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, she said that she had been prepared all of her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to choose between the good, the better, and the best—and yet this capacity turned out to be the one she most needed as she watched the sands of her life run out.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

“I thought about how there are so many lies in fear. So much deception. What else keeps us from living a better story than fear?”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“from an article called “Three Things to Say to Your Child Every Day” by Lisa A. McCrohan, Wellness Counselor at Georgetown University.* She explains the power of these three phrases: I see you. You matter. I love to watch you.”
― Rachel Macy Stafford, Hands Free Mama: A Guide to Putting Down the Phone, Burning the To-Do List, and Letting Go of Perfection to Grasp What Really Matters!

“Remember finally, that the ashes on your forehead are created from the burnt palms of last Palm Sunday. New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.”
― Richard Rohr, Wondrous Encounters: Scripture for Lent

“Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails. Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act. They are free to act, trusting that the practice itself will teach them what they need to know.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish—separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“You can get lost on your way home. You can get lost looking for love. You can get lost between jobs. You can get lost looking for God. However it happens, take heart. Others before you have found a way in the wilderness, where there are as many angels as there are wild beasts, and plenty of other lost people too. All it takes is one of them to find you. All it takes is you to find one of them. However it happens, you could do worse than to kneel down and ask a blessing, remembering how many knees have kissed this altar before you.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor

“I still have days when I feel like a fraud. And I still sometimes find myself spoken over and discounted while men sitting next to me are not. But now I know how to take a deep breath and keep my hand up. I have learned to sit at the table.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“The tragedy is not that we who occupy the middle class are rich when compared to the larger world but that we are rich and utterly unaware. We are rich and forget that we are rich. The scandal is not how much we have but how little we think we have, and thus, how much more we expect and demand. Our souls are in danger. In danger of the felony of ingratitude. In danger of straying from the God whose goodness is so immense and so often ignored.”
― Jeff Manion, Satisfied: Discovering Contentment in a World of Consumption

“To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a Third Metric, a third measure of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.”
― Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

“Email is your servant. Corner-office people have secretaries to prevent them from being interrupted.… Email will do all this for you too.” His advice: Turn off all notifications; you should control when you want information, not the reverse.”
― Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

“When a child loses confidence in his or her creativity, the impact can be profound. People start to separate the world into those who are creative and those who are not. They come to see these categories as fixed, forgetting that they too once loved to draw and tell imaginative stories. Too often they opt out of being creative.”
― Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

“Forgiveness, I am learning, cannot stand as a single, once-and-for-all event. Every morning brings a fresh coffeepot, and a fresh chance to get back to this messy and necessary work.”
― Seth Haines, Coming Clean: A Story of Faith

“Slowly, I started to enter more fully into the world of my refugee friends. As the days and months blended into years, I experienced strange paradoxes. The more I failed to communicate the love of God to my friends, the more I experienced it for myself. The more overwhelmed I felt as I became involved in the myriad of problems facing my friends who experience poverty in America, the less pressure I felt to attain success or wealth or prestige. And the more my world started to expand at my periphery, the more it became clear that life was more beautiful and more terrible than I had been told. The”
― D.L. Mayfield, Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith – Essays on Love, Justice, and Reimagining Citizenship

“If you want a child to know the truth, tell him the truth. If you want a child to love the truth, tell him a story.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

“New sight didn’t come from someone giving me a summary on how to get through tough times. It came from hitting rock bottom, knowing what suffering is, feeling what love can do, and continuing to let both teach me in the years that followed.”
― Lisa Gungor, The Most Beautiful Thing I've Seen: Opening Your Eyes to Wonder

“there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

“Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

“In life, in religion, in science, this I believe: any conviction worth its salt has chosen to cohabit with a piece of mystery, and that mystery is at the essence of the vitality and growth of the thing.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

“By being what only I can be, I give humanity what only I can give. It is my uniqueness that allows me to contribute something unique to the universal heritage of humankind. I sum up the Jewish imperative, very simply—and it has been like this since the days of Abraham: to be true to your faith is a blessing to others regardless of their faith. That’s the big paradox when you really reach the very depth of particularity.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

“I don’t know why it is, how it is, but it’s the authentic, the unique, the different that makes us feel enriched when we encounter it. And a bland, plastic, synthetic, universal can’t-tell-one-brand-of-coffee-from-another-brand-of-coffee by contrast makes life flat, uninteresting, and essentially uncreative.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

“I’m consciously shedding the assumption that a skeptical point of view is the most intellectually credible. Intellect does not function in opposition to mystery; tolerance is not more pragmatic than love; and cynicism is not more reasonable than hope. Unlike almost every worthwhile thing in life, cynicism is easy. It’s”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

“Lonely is one of the adjectives people like Shane Claiborne use, alongside unsustainable, to describe the culture of adulthood they grew up watching.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living