Joyful, Anyway Quotes

“In the face of suffering, we are laid low. We are humbled. We are humiliated by having lost control of our own futures. And we look around in hopes that someone else has seen it too.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“Realizing you’re the kind of person who misses out on life because you are too busy taking care of other people, falling into the quicksand of pain, or discounting your nicest moments.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“People will walk you through their lives like a series of rooms.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“anything is possible for those who believe.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“A real friend who returns your text right away and doesn’t make you feel weird when you ask for something.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“Being pain free for a day.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“There is a truth carried through feminist thought that impresses itself upon me in these moments: women are split in two. There is a public self and a private one.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“I always felt this in flashes, bursts of realization that the ordinariness of other people’s concerns struck me as a betrayal.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“that actual crisis of rupture and loss—but, no, it’s mostly the salvaging and the paperwork and the difficult conversations about how everyone will (or probably won’t) adjust to what’s happened that takes you apart.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“This is the thrownness of life, Heidegger explained, the way we cannot choose our future. We drift between currents like helium balloons in the sky.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“Sometimes suffering will make you better, so much better than you wanted to be. It has the wonderful advantage of sloughing off some of the soft rot in the human heart. Like ignorance. That is probably the first thing to go. Slice, slice. Then arrogance. Cut, cut. This is the forced humility of experience. It’s hard to feel better than other people when you are certain that you are made up of sadness and deli meat.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“Sometimes I get the distinct impression that my feelings are not actually my own. I have been plugged—Matrix-style—into the parasympathetic circuitry of the universe.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“Lately the number of small obligations and small heartaches—the sheer volume of them—makes me feel like I can’t breathe.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“We must admit there will be music despite everything.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“It feels, argues the theologian Charles Mathewes, like we’re experiencing a global withering of our capacity for joy.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“There are always two preachers at a funeral.” Death and Hope. That’s what my friend Tom Long likes to say. There will be a body, and then there needs to be a person who stands up to tell the story about the love that goes on and on.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“but I believe in joy. We can’t mistake it for anything less than what it is: one of the most powerful ways we experience the deepest and most healing forms of gratitude, delight, and hope. It is a kind of transcendence; joy is a glimmer of love and forgiveness and wholeness that lifts us out of reality for a moment and gives us back to ourselves, anew.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“When you are in the deep abyss of grief, sadness, or, worst of all, despair, joy feels like an insult.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“When a loss of any kind—breakup, breakdown, or any terrible undoing—descends upon your life, joy seems to vanish. The vibrancy that once filled your days fades, leaving the world colorless and cold. This sudden shift doesn’t simply numb; it transforms everything around you.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“You will never be cured of this grief, it’s true. But you will be joyful, anyway. I swear.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“modern death is a digital haunting, a never-finished flurry of notifications. I do not pretend to know where to find the key that unlocks the mystery between mothers and daughters, but I know that sometimes two people stare at each other and see only their reflection.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway