Glitter Saints Quotes

“I loved my mother like I love the moon—for just existing. Despite all her scars and changes, despite her cyclical darkness, she couldn’t help but mirror the light of life itself.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“…saving ourselves sometimes means hurting others, even if only in small ways, even if only temporarily. It’s mercy math: there’s a cost, but we count, too.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Embroidery is beautiful not only for what you see, but for all you don’t. From the back, it’s a messy map—absolute chaos, all switchbacks and starts. Knots upon knots, pulled with teeth and pricked fingers. Each one a prayer, on a string.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“In embroidery, there’s just as much undoing as there is doing—plucking and pulling your thread back through the holes you pierced to see where you might have gone off-course, and where you might begin again. Our ancestors once believed the stars themselves were a result of this kind of occurrence, pinpricks of light poked in the fabric of night. The Creator doesn’t make mistakes, but sometimes it’s so damn hard to see the reason.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“So many sunrises and sunsets have to happen to achieve a certain hue or perspective that didn’t exist before. That we can hold in our hands or wear upon our breast as evidence of our own weathering, talismans of our survival.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Maybe at the end of our lives we get a Ferris-Wheel vantage of the whole tapestry, the quilt laid flat, answering for its complexity. At the beginning we’re handed frayed and stained flowery bed sheets, a scrap of polka-dots, a snatch of strawberry print. Tattered as they are, there’s some sustaining sweetness in there.

The oldest pioneer quilts conceal bits of paper batting between their threadbare layers: postcards, recipes, clipped snippets of newspaper poetry. Every spare material had a part to play, fragments of experience and feeling arranged in a repeating pattern, little sewn sound bytes spinning ordered fractals.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“The work only comes through the work. It requires absolutely everything of you and the only real and lasting return of any of it is your self, realized. Who you’ve always been, beneath. Released in the layers: rising, rising.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“The healing had to start at the scene of the crime this time, my body. My creature self and my very vehicle for relationship, and memory. Humans aren’t mollusks, man. There’s no hard outer shell to protect the pearl-making. It’s all just soft, fragile skin. So vulnerable we all are. We gotta be so gentle with ourselves.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“There’s no product that can make you glow from within, and no potion aside from tears. Feeling the gut-hurt of life and letting it roll down your face is the only way.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Angels are terrifying because they illuminate this choice: stay small or embody all the love that God keeps showing you is your birthright.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Through this fresh wound coursed a catalyst. I had to make something. Even if it was for nothing.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Raising children is a course in vulnerability. We can’t take care of them in the way they deserve until we can treat our inner child the way she deserved all along. We have to look right into the mirror that children hold up to us and be brave enough to not look away, no matter how much that light burns.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Love doesn’t try to figure shit out, or solve anything. It just shines. Radiant and boundless, dangerous. Refined.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“What do you spin with the light you are given?

Releasing is in the telling, even as it is unfolding. In the middle of a miracle, God’s art exhibit we’re blessed to exist in. Once we look past ourselves and on to the possibilities of our contributions, we no longer have time or the hunger for such validation. Stay bewildered and in love with your possibilities. Thank your ego for your survival and then politely set it free. Jump into your spirit that lives in your soul and get busy creating beauty and love and stay so intoxicated with heart songs that you never remember to wonder about the mediocrity of life again.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“The muses aren’t the material, but they speak through the tools, sparking signals in a language of symbols we can only read backwards.The wounds have been the way. Back to where we started, brought to our knees, eye-level with those small oracles that speak directly to our heart.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“At the suggestion of life itself, who planted the seed, saying, More of this.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“. . . throughout the span of one’s life, lines get drawn and redrawn. All these arbitrary designations, the limits they describe to divide us. The only real boundary is our own skin. You can only trust where you’re drawn, where your love flows.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“When no one else believes in you, you gotta depend on what your inner eye is focusing on. Showing up for yourself causes the universe to adjust to your vision.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“It wasn’t a suit of armor, it was my insides on the outside. A wearable prayer.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“At the end of the day, it’s a big circus, a great parade. We’re all in it together, bare-assed in clown suits.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“They say your heart breaks to let the light in, but at some point some of our hearts break so hard and so often that they’re just filled with light, which has no choice but to shine back out. Maybe saints realize that before the rest of us do, which is why they’re always pointing to their hearts. They ask us not to harden against, but open to. They speak in tongues of trinkets, flowers and beads and glitter, small innocent things that insist throughout even the darkest times—bits of bright that are the philosophers’ stone. Strung up and clung to, shapeshifting the world itself.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“They were her recognition and her offering—a bit of matter, coated in glitter, and placed before a saint.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Mom wasn’t gonna sugarcoat anything, not ever. But she also wasn’t going to let it pass by. Nothing in her life, it seemed, was salvageable. But everything was material.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Two steps forward and one step back is still progress, binding us to stronger stuff. People can tell you all day long that you’re strong. What’s more helpful to hear is, use your strength.

That’s the step forward, stabilized.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Maybe you don’t have shit besides a skateboard and a Supertramp record, but if you have one true friend you have everything. . .”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Revolutions begin with what is most intimate, with the things that lay against our skin. Clothing-creators world and time over have taken the greatest risks expressing themselves through what is hidden—reimagining movement, finding breath.
The alterations reverberate through each successive layer.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“She had to get to the essence of the thing—to feel with her hands the undoing, and watch with her own eyes the reconnection.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Creativity promises you a mess; making meaning of that mess is the whole world. Sometimes it’s all chaos, a collection of stains. Art is just an offering to the process.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“When you’re in the middle of chaos, it’s hard to see what is being built. Sometimes the evidence is all we have. I learned to allow whatever marks the world made to speak their space, and I drew around them what I could.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“The pacts of children are holy little husks, the most well-intentioned things in the universe. Sealed with spit, whispered for safety, they’re the things we’re most afraid to speak, and the covenants that keep this great world spinning.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir