You matter to me. Reading those words, I thought my heart would burst. That is the crux of love, one person mattering to another person, one existence that is important among all other lives. One person can count for something individual and special. We are not interchangeable. We are unique in how we are loved.
— Nina Sankovitch, My Year of Magical Reading, p. 127
I belong to the community of the written word in several ways. First, books have taught me most of what I know, and they have trained my attention and my imagination. Second, they gave me a sense of the possible, which is the great service — and too often, when it is ungenerous, the great disservice — a community performs for its members. Third, they embodied richness and refinement of language, and the artful use of language in the service of the imagination. Fourth, they gave me and still give me courage. Sometimes, when I have spent days in my study dreaming a world while the world itself shines outside my windows, forgetting to call my mother because one of my nonbeings has come up with a thought that interests me, I think, this is a very odd way to spend a life. But I have my library all around me, my cloud of witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience, who have helped me to my deepest enjoyments of it.
— Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child, I Read Books, p. 22-23
The purpose of the Lord is good beyond our imagining. We come to God with our troubles, and God renders back to us his gifts. No adversity is too great to be transformed. As the psalmist exclaims in Psalm 98:1: “O sing to the Lord a new song; for he has done marvelous things.”
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 220
Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true: We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape.
— Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow, p. 5-6
No matter how overt or covert the abuser is, all abusers do one thing universally. That one thing is this: abusers define their partners as if they were living within them and knew their inner world: what they are, their motives, thoughts, feelings, and so forth.
Abusers behave as though they were their partner, child, friend, or acquaintance. That is, abusers act as if they know what another person is, thinks, needs, feels, wants, and is doing, did, and should do.
In summary, when someone defines you in any way, tells you what you are (“too sensitive,” “stupid,” “hopeless.”), or actually tells you your motives (for example, “You’re trying to start a fight,” “You want to win,” “You want to have the last word”), he or she is behaving as if he or she were you, or were God!
In normal discourse among people, if you criticize someone, you are usually quick to apologize when you realize that you have no right (unless invited) to critique the other.
If verbal abuse has slammed into your consciousness with assaults that attempt to erase your own awareness of who you are and how you perceive yourself and even your existence, then verbal abuse may brainwash you into believing that you actually are a person who is too sensitive.
This is what is wrong with verbal abuse and why I support your victory over it.
— Patricia Evans, Victory Over Verbal Abuse, p. 36
People share books they love. They want to spread to friends and family the goodness that they felt when reading the book or the ideas they found in the pages. In sharing a loved book, a reader is trying to share the same excitement, pleasure, chills, and thrills of reading that they themselves experienced. Why else share? Sharing a love of books and of one particular book is a good thing. But it is also a tricky maneuver, for both sides. The giver of the book is not exactly ripping open her soul for a free look, but when she hands over the book with the comment that it is one of her favorites, such an admission is very close to the baring of the soul. We are what we love to read, and when we admit to loving a book, we admit that the book represents some aspect of ourselves truly, whether it is that we are suckers for romance or pining for adventure or secretly fascinated by crime.
— Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, p. 101
Allowing ourselves the luxury of becoming what God intended is so much more peaceful than trying to force situations whose time has not come. The freedom to let life simply be whatever it will be in this moment gives us a lot of extra time to smile at strangers, to lend a helping hand to others, to watch children running down the street, and to appreciate the birds chirping as we take that early morning walk.
Allowing life to simply be doesn’t mean we stand idly by. On the contrary, it means we honor those directions we feel God is sending us. We listen to those words of guidance we feel are directing our way, making sure that no matter what we do in any given moment, we are not causing harm to someone else. Letting go of our attachment to how our life should unfold is a wonderful gift to give ourselves.
— Karen Casey, Let Go Now, p. 100
In prayer, I see the suffering bathed in light. In God, there is no darkness. I see God’s light permeate them, soak into them, guide their feet. I want to tell God what to do: “Look, Pal, this is a catastrophe. You have got to shape up.” But it wouldn’t work. So I pray for people who are hurting, that they be filled with air and light. Air and light heal; they somehow get into those dark, musty places, like spiritual antibiotics.
— Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, p. 16
You cannot speed up your efforts to create a life that is slower paced any more than you can successfully fight for peace.
— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance, p. 178
If Jesus were a magic prayer machine, he’d have healed this woman’s daughter instantly, and we would not have discovered her feisty, creative spirit. Likewise, Jesus’ ambiguity with us creates the space not only for him to emerge but us as well. If the miracle comes too quickly, there is no room for discovery, for relationship. With both this woman and us, Jesus is engaged in a divine romance, wooing us to himself.
The waiting that is the essence of faith provides the context for relationship. Faith and relationship are interwoven in dance. Everyone talks about how prayer is relationship, but often what people mean is having warm fuzzies with God. Nothing wrong with warm fuzzies, but relationships are far richer and more complex.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 190-191