Bittersweet Quotes

“...when I've practiced acceptance, when I've floated instead of fought, when I've rested, even for a moment, on the surface instead of wrestling the water itself. And those moments are like heaven.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“We create because we were made to create, having been made in the image of God, whose first role was Creator. He was and is a million different things, but in the beginning, he was a creator. That means something for us, I think. We were made to be the things that he is: forgivers, redeemers, second chance-givers, truth-tellers, hope-bringers. And we were certainly, absolutely, made to be creators.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“It’s sloppy theology to think that all suffering is good for us, or that it’s a result of sin. All suffering can be used for good, over time, after mourning and healing, by God’s graciousness. But sometimes it’s just plain loss, not because you needed to grow, not because life or God or anything is teaching you any kind of lesson. The trick is knowing the difference between the two.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I believe in a very deep way that our past is what brings us to our future. When I pray for someone, I thank God for every day of their life, for every moment, for every heartbreak and each moment of happiness that has brought them to be this person at this time. I believe in mining through the darkest seasons in our lives and choosing to believe that we’ll find something important every time.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Left to our own devices, we sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“When Life is Well say THANK YOU & CELEBRATE, and when life is Bitter say THANK YOU & GROW.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Good friendships are like breakfast. You think you’re too busy to eat breakfast, but then you find yourself exhausted and cranky halfway through the day, and discover that your attempt to save time totally backfired.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I don’t know if this is a season of sweetness or one of sadness. But I’m learning that neither last forever.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“what is empty will be filled, what is broken will be repaired, and what is lost can always be found, no matter how many times it’s been lost.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“When you haven’t yet had your heart really broken, the gospel isn’t about death and rebirth. It’s about life and more life. It’s about hope and possibility and a brighter future. And it is, certainly, about those things. But when you’ve faced some kind of death—the loss of someone you loved dearly, the failure of a dream, the fracture of a relationship—that’s when you start understanding that central metaphor. When your life is easy, a lot of the really crucial parts of Christian doctrine and life are nice theories, but you don’t really need them. When, however, death of any kind is staring you in the face, all of a sudden rebirth and new life are very, very important to you.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I used to think that the ability to turn back time would be the greatest possible gift, so that I could undo all the things I wish I hadn’t done. But grace is an even better gift, because it allows me to do more than just erase; it allows me to become more than I was when I did those things. It’s forgiveness without forgetting, which is much sweeter than amnesia.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“A story is never about one person. It has a full cast of characters, connected by blood or love or jealousy. There’s nothing small or inconsequential about our stories. There is, in fact, nothing bigger. And when we tell the truth about our lives—the broken parts, the secret parts, the beautiful parts—then the gospel comes to life, an actual story about redemption, instead of abstraction and theory”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“When we, any of us who have been transformed by Christ, tell our own stories, we’re telling the story of who God is.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I understand the temptation to draw an angry X through a whole season or a whole town or a whole relationship, to crumple it up and throw it away, to get it as far away as possible from a new life, a new future. But I think that’s both the easiest and the most cowardly choice. These days I’m walking over and retrieving those years from the trash, erasing the X, unlocking the door. It’s the only way that darkness turns to light.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“And most important, I’ll choose to believe that sometimes the happiest ending isn’t the one you keep longing for, but something you absolutely cannot see from where you are.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“to be true about life, too. If you dig in and fight the change you’re facing, it will indeed smash you to bits. It will hold you under, drag you across the rough sand, scare and confuse you. This last season in my life has been characterized, more than anything else, by change. Hard, swirling, one-after-another changes, so many that I can’t quite regain my footing before the next one comes, very much like”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Now is your time. Become, believe, try. Walk closely with people you love, and with other people who believe that God is very good and life is a grand adventure. Don’t spend time with people who make you feel like less than you are. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned. Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep traveling honestly along life’s path.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“God is present to me, possibly more so than ever because of my desperation, and the world he made nourishes me with its beauty and hope as much as it ever has. I believe still today what I have always believed: that God is good, that the world he made is extraordinary, and that his comfort is like nothing else on earth.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“If we didn’t have bodies, we couldn’t feel the sun on our faces or smell the earthy, mushroom-y rich smell of the ground right after the rain. If we didn’t have bodies, we couldn’t wrap our arms around the people we love or taste a perfect tomato right at the height of summer. I’m so thankful to live in this physical, messy, blood-and-guts world. I don’t want to live in a world that’s all dry ideas and theorems. Food is one of the ways we acknowledge our humanity, our appetites, our need for nourishment. And so it may seem trivial or peripheral to some people, but to me, when I’m telling a story, the part about what we ate really does matter.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“You want me to say that when you grow, finally, all the changes will stop, but they don't. There will be another one, another opportunity to grow, to shed your skin, to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, to break out of your cocoon like a perfect new butterfly.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Because there really is nothing like good friends, like the sounds of their laughter and the tones of their voices and the things they teach us in the quietest, smallest moments.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“when you stay with something instead of walking away, it builds something new inside of you, something solid and weighty, something durable. But you do have to wait for it. You have to earn it the hard way.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“This is what I’ve come to believe about change: it’s good, in the way that childbirth is good, and heartbreak is good, and failure is good. By that I mean that it’s incredibly painful, exponentially more so if you fight it, and also that it has the potential to open you up, to open life up, to deliver you right into the palm of God’s hand, which is where you wanted to be all along, except that you were too busy pushing and pulling your life into exactly what you thought it should be.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“when you do what you love with people who love the same thing, something is born into your midst and begins to connect you.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“One of my core fears is that someone would think I can’t handle as much as the next person. It’s fundamental to my understanding of myself for me to be the strong one, the capable one, the busy one, the one who can bail you out, not make a fuss, bring a meal, add a few more things to the list. For me, everything becomes a lifestyle. Everything is an addiction.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“This is what I know: God can make something beautiful out of anything, out of darkness and trash and broken bones. He can shine light into even the blackest night, and he leaves glimpses of hope all around us. An oyster, a sliver of moon, one new bud on a black branch, a perfect tender shoot of asparagus, fighting up through the dirt for the spring sun. New life and new beauty are all around us, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be seen.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Bittersweet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a sliver of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich when it contains a splinter of sadness. Bittersweet is the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul. Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands. Sweet is nice enough, but bittersweet is beautiful, nuanced, full of depth and complexity. Bittersweet is courageous, gutsy, earthy.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“So these days, I’m on the lookout for grace, and I’m especially on the lookout for ways that I withhold grace from myself and from other people. At first, showing people grace makes you feel powerful, like scattering candy from a float in a parade—grace for you, grace for you. You become almost giddy, thinking of people in generous ways, allowing for their faults, absorbing minor irritations. You feel great, and then you start to feel just ever so slightly superior, because you’re so incredibly evolved and gracious. But then inevitably something happens, and it usually involves you confronting one of your worst selves, often in public, and you realize that you’re not throwing candy off a float to a nameless, dirty public, but rather that you are that nameless, dirty public, and that you are starving and on your knees, praying for a little piece of sweetness, just one mouthful of grace.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“And this is what Denise told me: she said 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