Joyful, Anyway Quotes

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“Joy is the idea that… Yes. It is good to exist. Even now. It is the ultimate yes.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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