The Beauty in Breaking Quotes

“Brokenness can be a remarkable gift. If we allow it, it can expand our space to transform - this potential space that is slight, humble, and unassuming. It may seem counterintuitive to claim the benefits of having been broken, but it is precisely when cracks appear in the bedrock of what we thought we knew that the gravity of what has fallen away becomes evident. When that bedrock is blown up by illness, a death, a breakup, a breakdown of any kind, we get the chance to look beyond the rubble to see a whole new way of life. The landscape that had been previously obscured by the towers of what we thought we knew for sure is suddenly revealed, showing us the limitations of the way things used to be.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“A human being can never treat another person better than he treats himself.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“In practicing the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi, one repairs broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, silver, or platinum. The choice to highlight the breaks with precious metals not only acknowledges them, but also pays tribute to the vessel that has been torn apart by the mutability of life. The previously broken object is considered more beautiful for its imperfections. In life, too, even greater brilliance can be found after mending.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“thank you to the ground that relentlessly rises up to meet us as long as we’re willing to take the next step.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“Forgiveness condones nothing, but it does cast off the chains of anger, judgment, resentment, denial, and pain that choke growth. In this way, it allows for life, for freedom. So that’s what’s at stake when it comes to forgiveness: freedom. With this freedom we can feel better, be better, and choose better next time.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“This devastation is a crossroads with a choice; to remain in the ashes or to forge ahead unburdened. Here is the chance to mold into a new nakedness, strengthened by the legacy of resilience to climb over the debris toward a different life.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“It was worth creating good with the right person at the right time. I am worth being healthy with a person who also chooses health.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“After all, this is the only way oppression can function: It requires the buy-in of a certain percentage of those it actively oppresses in order to pit those groups of subjugated people against one another.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were. —HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“We had all been broken in that moment - broken open by shock and grief and anger and fear. I didn't know how or when, but this opening could lead to healing. After all, only an empty vessel can be filled by grace; but to get there, we had to help each other rise while we shed the same tears. We had to get up and start again.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“Plagued with doubt, I found myself having to reevaluate my life. Living through such changes was difficult; now I see those junctures, when everything I had counted on came to an abrupt end, as a privilege. They gave me the opportunity to be uncertain. And in that uncertainty grew opportunity”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“Like everyone, I am in this world for only a brief time. And as for many, blessings abound in my life, and they abound amid the struggle, amid my struggle.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“Being drunk never changes a person, but it does grant their shadow selves free rein to step forward.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“I got it, too, how good people can lose their way during life transitions. How they can behave in self-destructive ways until they master another pattern—should they ever choose another pattern”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“I cut these cords to support myself. I knew by then that it was only from that space that I could make my own assessments. It was only then that I could finally confront him about his abusive behavior. I told him that he had been a terrorist in our family, that he had so profoundly ruined some of its members’ lives that they struggled with substance abuse, that my mother still flinched at loud noises. I told him that if he ever wanted to communicate with me again, he would first have to acknowledge the truth of who he was. Instead of admitting that any of what I’d said had even occurred, he vanished. He made his choice.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“Like everyone, I am in this world for only a brief time.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“after letting go, there is forgiveness; after forgiveness, there is faith. My key now was a radical alignment with truth, a radical faith that in leaning into love and letting go of everything else, the path unfolds as it should.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“What I’m really doing is finding someone to validate my low self-esteem...”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“There’s a macabre medical maxim that says that the good people get the worst diseases. If a person is generous of spirit and comes in with a nagging abdominal discomfort the week after she runs a marathon, we’ll discover she has stage-four ovarian cancer. The racist pedophile who drowns kittens on Sundays survives being struck by lightning and lung cancer as he chain-smokes into his nineties.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“What struck me powerfully was that Mr. Spano had honored every word of his inner contract. Like everyone, he had this right of self determination. We do this when we select a partner who confirms our feelings of unworthiness. When we pick the job that pays us less than we deserve. It is all the same. It is all part of that contract, that even if we didn’t write it for ourselves, we certainly cosigned.

I wondered too about my contract with myself. I wondered why the behavior of this self-hating man would rock me for even a second. I thought about how I needed to love myself enough to allow others to fulfill their contract with themselves. Be it Mr. Spano, my ex-husband, my father, my mother, Collin, the hospital administrators, or anyone else. Mr. Spano’s contract demanded that he act in ways that were dismissive of my attempts to help him. A human being can never treat another person better than he treats himself. So, if he says things that are disrespectful, this is his contract. His contract has nothing to do with mine, unless I allow it to. Unless I uncover a clause, in minuscule print on page five. A clause that I overlooked, that stipulates my need to be validated by the Mr. Spanos of the world in order to feel OK about myself. He was kind enough to prompt me to review that section again, to edit out that portion for good. In that way, he was an angel of the shift.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“I contemplated my time with Mr. Spano and Joshua. I marveled that Mr. Spano who, once he’d learned that he wasn’t going to die that afternoon, found the prospect of remaining in the hospital so unsettling that he preferred to hobble out on a bloated, red leg and risk dying a few days later, although he wasn’t yet 30.

I wondered what it must have felt like for him, without the haze of intoxication to blur the relationship between himself and the truth. What was so terrible to face that death would be preferable? How might his inner contract read that he would be consumed with such a compulsion?

I am not healthy and cannot commit to healing. I am not strong enough to heal. I am fearful, so I must run. I am not worth fighting for. I am not worth healing for. I cannot endure the pain of facing my life. Because I am afraid, I cannot be here, sober. Besides, I cannot be helped. I do not love myself enough to take care of myself. I do not love myself enough to allow you to take care of me. I do not deserve wellness, so I return to what I deserve.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“how good people can lose their way during life transitions. How they can behave in self-destructive ways until they master another pattern—should they”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“was reminded, too, of Dr. Albert Kligman’s experiments on imprisoned men in Philadelphia from the 1950s to the 1970s. Kligman biopsied, burned, and deformed the bodies of prison inmates to study the effects of hundreds of experimental drugs. Men were subjected to such atrocities as inoculation with herpes, gonorrhea, and various carcinogens. Kligman went on to become a millionaire after co-developing the popular acne medication Retin-A via his studies on inmates, while many of his victims were left with chronic medical conditions that irrevocably damaged their organ systems.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“Speak these truths aloud, for it is only in silence that horror can persist. The courage to call a thing by its true name galvanizes the human spirit to address it.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“Perhaps what bothers me most is the raw realization that I care more deeply for the welfare of another human being than he cares for himself”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“So,”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“We are not yet at a time in America when the attributed or perceived actions of a brown or black or queer or Muslim “wrongdoer” are considered singular. Instead, such accused are seen as emblematic of an entire demographic, one labeled guilty before charged. And yet, the overwhelming majority of spree killers from the most notable mass shootings in U.S. history are male and white.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“What a critical life lesson: to learn to distinguish enabling from helping, codependence from love, attachment to reenacting the grief of childhood loss from allowing for the sweetness of self-determination.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“Or maybe I could start by telling him that I was finally figuring out that all bodies ache with a wisdom that wants to be appreciated. And that if I were still enough to listen, if I were brave enough to be vulnerable and courageous enough to have faith in the potential of this life, I would see that I was already healed.”
― Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking