Heather King > Quotes

“I once heard a sober alcoholic say that drinking never made him happy, but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in about fifteen minutes. That was exactly it, and I couldn’t understand why the happiness never came, couldn’t see the flaw in my thinking, couldn’t see that alcohol kept me trapped in a world of illusion, procrastination, paralysis. I lived always in the future, never in the present. Next time, next time! Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again. And all my efforts were doomed, because already drinking hadn’t made me feel good in years.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“I had no idea what time I’d left, how I’d gotten home, who’d been up here, and how long he, she, or they had stayed. Another night, added to the hundreds that had gone before, shrouded in mystery. Really, when you thought about it, it was creepy. My own life was a secret to me.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“There's nothing inherently interesting about being a drunk -- in fact, quite the contrary.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”
― Heather King, Parched

“Children laugh an average of three hundred or more times a day; adults laugh an average of five times a day. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
― Heather King, Crib Notes/Words of Wisdom for Every New Mom

“We're called to speak to people to whom we often don't feel like speaking; to refrain from surrounding ourselves with people "just like us," whose thoughts, ideas, and actions we can more or less manage and control; to share not just with the poor, but with the rich, the mediocre, the irritating, the Republicans, the Democrats, because we never know who the poor are. We never know whose heart is hemorrhaging. We never know who needs a kind work, a smile, a helping hand.”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux

“Looking out over the water, I spotted him right away,straddling his board. He was only a dot, but I would have known him anywhere.I thought of the shape of his hands,the hollow at the base of his spine,the way my heart had never stopped skipping a beat at the sound of his voice, and I realized it was the kind of loss- because I knew now that the thing I wanted more than anything in the world not to go fully wrong could- from which I would never fully recover. And I'm not sure I ever fully have.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“Even back then I understood the real purpose of literature. I didn’t want to hear that people lived happily ever after. I wanted to know that other people suffered, too.”
― Heather King, Parched

“The irony of instant gratification is that it leaves such lasting scars.”
― Heather King, Parched

“My heart was beating so hard that for a second I thought I might pass out. It was like revisiting the hole where you'd once been held in solitary confinement: a force field of muscle-memory-stored pain and toxic energy so palpable I was afraid that if I stayed any longer it might suck me back in.”
― Heather King

“We can discover that of the rough material we’ve been given, every single thread of what we’ll eventually contribute back to the tapestry of all humanity is every bit as important, needed, wanted, and cherished as every and any other scrap and thread.”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

“I didn’t want to hear that people lived happily ever after. I wanted to know that other people suffered, too.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“Like the rest of the world, they seemed to have figured out something I didn't know - where they'd come from, where they were going - and moved on.”
― Heather King

“Anyone to whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart. —Ludwig Wittgenstein”
― Heather King, Redeemed: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity, and the Peace That Passes AllUnderstanding

“You’ll find that Christ spent most of his life healing, teaching, and hanging out with those who wanted to be called to a higher way of life. He got a kick out of all the things we do—eating, drinking, swapping stories, telling jokes—and he got the right kind of kick because he was utterly united to the Father in prayer. He made himself available to all kinds of very unpromising people—just as we’re called to do. He had a special heart for those so desperate that they were willing to make holy fools of themselves in their hunger and need. Christ reveals himself in the deeply messy, profoundly awkward world of face-to-face human interaction with people in trouble, conflict, doubt, hunger, thirst, and pain.”
― Heather King, Holy Desperation: Praying as If Your Life Depends on It

“If I've made any "progress" it's that now I know I'll be an alcoholic till the day I die, and that is both my biggest cross and my greatest blessing.”
― Heather King

“The Jesus Prayer Having had my fill of listening, without acquiring any understanding of how to pray unceasingly, I gave up on such sermons that were geared to the general public. I then resolved, with the help of God, to seek an experienced and knowledgeable guide who would explain unceasing prayer to me, for I now found myself so irresistibly drawn to learning about it.38 —Anonymous, The Way of a Pilgrim”
― Heather King, Holy Desperation: Praying as If Your Life Depends on It

“All along, I had thought that the attachment, or midlife crisis, or dark night of the soul, or whatever my experience had been, was a terrible stumbling block, a sign of shameful weakness, evidence of some core, incurable insanity: in short, The Problem. Now I knew that, in some very difficult, mysterious way, it had actually been The Solution. My struggle went way beyond any relationship with, or way of seeing, a mere human being. All along, I had thought my error lay in failing to find the formula to love correctly, unselfishly, when the very idea of trying to be perfect myself, with respect to human relationships-or any other way- was the real problem. Forget trying to achieve your own holiness, Therese seemed to be saying: you are infinitely too feeble, weak, and misguided to accomplish anything on your own. You're like a bleating lamb, wandering blindly around with your divided, wayward heart... Sit down on the floor, like a baby, and Christ will bend down and lift you up.”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux

“one of my biggest illusions was that other people were meant to assuage my anxiety by filling some lack that I was responsible for filling myself. If I wanted to give, the giving had to be “for fun and for free.” The giving couldn’t be out of guilt, nor because I secretly wanted to get something back, nor because I wanted the other person to respond in such a way as to satisfy my longing to be useful. Thérèse”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

“Prayer is like practicing the piano or ballet or writing: you have to bring your body for a very long time, in spite of your body’s frailties and conflicts and general revolt, and then one day your body is not separate any more. You’ve in a sense become the piano or the dance or the word or the prayer. The prayer is in your heart. The prayer is your heart.”
― Heather King, STRIPPED: Cancer, Culture, and the Cloud of Unknowing

“The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help. That is, only for one who feels infinite anguish.”
― Heather King, Redeemed: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity, and the Peace That Passes AllUnderstanding

“over the horizon.”
― Heather King, Redeemed: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity, and the Peace That Passes AllUnderstanding

“Christ-as always, the model-never sat back, crossed his arms, and dismissed the annoying, the troublesome, or the unpromising. He never name-called, never judged, never treated a single person with contempt. Christ talked to everybody, he mingled with everybody, he shared his message with everybody, and he also loved everybody. So don't count the cost with anybody either. We don't waste our time with people who don't want what we have to offer. But if they do, one form of martyrdom is to give a listening ear or an understanding smile to all comers.”
― Heather King

“the opposite of holding on is participating in something larger than ourselves.”
― Heather King, Redeemed: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity, and the Peace That Passes AllUnderstanding

“Thérèse may not have been brought to a spiritual crisis in the particular way I had been—through alcoholism—but she had been brought to a crisis by a “neurotic illness”: her hypersensitivity, her inability to put the desire to please God before the desire to be noticed, coddled, and loved, which—along with the neurological glitch that gives rise to the phenomenon of craving and the “allergic” response that gives rise to mental obsession—is really what alcoholism consists of. Görres’s description of the lightning-quick opening that takes place below the strata of consciousness paralleled the “yes” I’d given to getting sober: a consent to grow up, take on the responsibilities of adulthood, and orient my life toward service.”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

“On the contrary, that someone as weak and”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

“I had also pled, the whole year, to be wholly relieved of my romantic attachment; begged to stop loving so much. But I had finally been given to see that my desire was what made me human; that desire was my glory and my cross; that desire had given me a window onto the divine that would sustain me all my life. I had seen at least one person as God must us-for where did my eyes come from but God? - and that is a rare and precious gift.”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux