Crissi > Crissi's Quotes

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
― Maya Angelou

“What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott

“You can either practice being right or practice being kind.”
― Anne Lamott

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.”
― Marianne Williamson

“We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present.”
― Marianne Williamson

“We can always choose to perceive things differently. We can focus on what's wrong in our life, or we can focus on what's right.”
― Marianne Williamson

“I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Being a writer brings out a sassy woman inside me, and I love her so.”
― Anna Bayes

“Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.”
― Stephanie Roberts

“It was the closest she’d ever come to praying. Even in her darkest moments, she had never turned to God. That was her mom’s deal, not hers.”
― Crissi Langwell, The Road to Hope

“Shhh,” Mr. Winston whispered into her hair. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.” He said it over and over again, just as the boy had done when she was at her most helpless. He rocked her with each stanza of the hypnotic prayer, and she melted into his arms, letting him be her strength as she cried into his chest.
“I couldn’t keep her,” she finally mustered, wiping her nose against his scratchy flannel.
“Shhh…” he repeated. He kissed the top of her head and then stood. With surprising strength, the elderly man lifted her as if she weighed nothing, bringing her to the car. He opened the car door with one hand, sat her in the front seat, and then buckled her in like she was a child. Exhausted, Maddie didn’t fight him or try to do it on her own. She needed someone else to be in charge for a while. She needed to be taken care of.”
― Crissi Langwell, The Road to Hope

“She drifted down into the water, letting it engulf her body until even her face was underwater. The silence was delicious, just the sound of her own heartbeat in her ears.”
― Crissi Langwell, The Road to Hope

“Have you ever loved someone so much, you felt like your heart was going to just beat right out of your chest?”
― Crissi Langwell, The Road to Hope

“Maddie breathed in deep, inhaling the scent of breakfast and dish soap, clean laundry and wood floors, sunshine and a room filled with love. It smelled like home.”
― Crissi Langwell, The Road to Hope

“It was a phone call she didn’t want to make. She didn’t want to hurt him. Whatever words she gave him, it would take being a daddy away from him.”
― Crissi Langwell, The Road to Hope

“Even when the sun was shining she couldn’t see it. The whole house was closing in on her and she was suffocating.”
― Crissi Langwell, The Road to Hope

“Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.”
― Randall Jarrell

“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.”
― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

“In this moment
Do not wait to be beautiful. Be your beautiful, authentic self right now.
If the world offers up negativity and despair, surprise the world by giving back love and kindness. Send out the energy that you wish to experience, and you are certain to experience it.

Happiness and fulfillment are alive in this moment. Allow them to flow freely and creatively through your life.
Fall in love all over again with the miracle of being. Your imagination is great and magnificent, yet it cannot hold even a fraction of the possibilities.

You'll do, say and act your best when you feel your best. Feel the limitless wonder of this very moment.
Be beautiful, alive, aware and filled with the energy of the possible. In this moment, is every dream made and fulfilled”
― Ralph S. Marston Jr.

“My little beast, my eyes, my favorite stolen egg. Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I’ve only found sorrow.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible