Joyful, Anyway Quotes

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

“Life is absurd and it’s hard to be human. Joy won’t cure you but it will carry you…. We take our chances that all things considered, life is worth living”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“Joy is the idea that… Yes. It is good to exist. Even now. It is the ultimate yes.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“There is nothing frivolous about taking meaningful steps to become a happier person, and it’s easy to see that happiness is a cousin to joy. But it’s not joy. Joy goes all the way down. You can’t be happy and sad at the same time, but you can’t joyful and sad at the same time.”
― 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

“Fear has a wild way of making us alert, wary, and hungry for more life.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“nothing happens automatically in the spiritual life. Joy does not simply happen to us.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“I guess… okay, I’ll be totally honest: I am much better in a crisis. Spiritually, I mean. I can face down an existential crisis and stare at the apocalypse and feel enormous amounts of love and peace. But then the second that crisis is over, I feel like such a terrible person. Ordinary life - email, pickups, trying to find a new moisturizer - that stuff makes me feel so itchy. I feel disappointed in myself…. Because I want more. So much more….”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“When did I decide that everyone else gets my best gifts? Why is my light always facing out and never in?”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“Complete control is an illusion. It is a beautiful lie.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“The most unforgivable things will happen to you. What happens, happens. And there will be no apology.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“Joy does not need to wait for you to heal.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The trees are beautiful out of my window.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“I took a nap with zero guilt.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“My two dogs love me.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“I quit my job because it was toxic to my health. Hard, but good!”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway

“Instead, we ought to be listening to the psychologist Lisa Damour, who offers a wonderfully reassuring definition of mental health that has absolutely nothing to do with being consistently happy. Mental health, she argues, is actually about feeling what is appropriate to the situation. In a traffic accident? Fear and anger sound right. Thinking about your friend who went through cancer with you? Sadness is key. When we allow ourselves to experience the whole range of human emotion, there can be no “wrong” emotion. Who knows? We might even spare ourselves secondary pain—that unnecessary suffering born of the guilt and shame of not looking on the bright side of life.”
― Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway