Steve Leder > Quotes

“Pain diminishes us, and it is so important to remember, in the midst of pain and everything that pain takes from you, that still ... you are enough. You are enough just as you are. You are worthy of love and kindness. You are enough. And you have enough.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“That’s really all they ask of us—our parents; our lovers, husbands, and wives; our children and dear friends. That we carry them gently in our lives as they carried us in theirs. Not with crushing sadness, for they do not wish such weight upon us. But with lightness and warmth. God bless them for the memories they left for us that make carrying them with joy possible. The wisdom and love they bequeathed us. The joy and comfort they brought to us as they carried us through life so that now we might carry them forever in our hearts—without bitterness, without crushing sadness. When someone has loved us well and long, we need not buckle beneath the weight of sorrow. Instead, we can carry them with us with gratitude, completeness, and joy.”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“Understanding death - its rituals, its lessons, its gift to reshape love through memory, its grief, its powerful reminder that it is not what but who we have that matters - gives our lives exquisite meaning.”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“It is the impermanence of the body that has convinced me of the eternality of the soul. Physics tells us that energy never dies, it merely assumes a different form. I never feel this more deeply than when gazing upon a dead body, a vessel emptied of its life force, a force that must surely now exist elsewhere.”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“Your children will be sad," I tell Franny, "but they will not die because you die. They will live and laugh and love with everything you have given them in their hearts forever. They will discover you in unexpected moments and places for the rest of their lives.”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“Pain cracks us open. It breaks us. But in the breaking, there is a new kind of wholeness that emerges.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“To be human is to suffer, and there is profound power in the suffering we endure if we transform it into a more authentic, meaningful life. Pain is a great teacher, but the lessons do not come easily.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“, and not because they are exceptional, but because they are human, like all of us, with a capacity to move forward in life despite the worst pain of death and grief.”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“When you show people a picture of a circle with a small wedge cut out of it, their eyes first go to the missing piece every time. It is easy among the doctors, the needles, and the tubes to lose sight of the beauty that was. Despite our pain, our fear, and our very real loses, we would do well to think about our many past blessing with our loved one who is now diminished. There is so much more to who we were and who we are than just the missing piece.”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“We are helpless in death, but we are not helpless in life.”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“This is the beauty and the tragedy of my father's life and death. For him, for me, for most of us at the time, for better and for worse, death is life's mirror.”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“The dead don’t go anywhere. They’re all here. Each man is a cemetery. An actual cemetery, in which lie all our grandmothers and grandfathers, the father and mother, the wife, the child. Everyone is here all the time.” It’s literally true, in the sense that we have within us the DNA of family that came before us. It is also metaphorically true in the sense that we carry the stories, the experiences, the wisdom, the failures, and the beauty of each of the lives on our family tree that came before our own. And not just of family, but of everyone we care about, everyone who has in some way touched our lives.”
― Steve Leder, For You When I Am Gone: Twelve Essential Questions to Tell a Life Story

“the single most important thing in life is showing up.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“If you want to change your life—really change—wake up to the blessed life you already have despite your pain.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“There are angels all around us. Angels in our friends, our family; people we meet. Sometimes you don’t see those angels until you really need them.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“The beauty of flowers depends on the fact that they soon wither. How deeply could one deathless "human" being really love another? It is the simple fact that we do not have forever that makes our love for each other so profound.”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“To say we do not believe in God because we believe in science is like saying we do not believe in love because we believe in math, or to say I cannot love my daughter because I love my son. Religion and science are two different things, neither dependent upon the other for its existence.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“Pain is the house that will listen patiently to your tears.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“They were waiting for something to happen—waiting for the right man or the right woman; waiting for children to grow up; waiting to pay off the mortgage; waiting for a vacation; waiting for retirement; waiting to get involved in the community; waiting to learn some new skill or hobby; waiting, waiting, waiting. Ninety-four percent of us waiting, while each new day passes us by.”
― Steve Leder, For You When I Am Gone: Twelve Essential Questions to Tell a Life Story

“Reaching out to those who suffer, one by one, is a holy act.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“I have never understood how people can pray for mercy and compassion from God but not be merciful and compassionate themselves.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“Birth is a beginning and death a destination; But life is a journey. A going, a growing from stage to stage: From childhood to maturity and youth to old age; From innocence to awareness and ignorance to knowing; From foolishness to discretion and then perhaps, to wisdom. From weakness to strength or strength to weakness and often back again. From health to sickness and back, we pray, to health again; From offense to forgiveness, from loneliness to love From joy to gratitude, from pain to compassion From grief to understanding, from fear to faith; From defeat to defeat to defeat, until, looking backward or ahead: We see that victory lies not at some high place along the way, But in having made the journey, stage by stage, a sacred pilgrimage. . . .”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“There is nothing I can say to make this easier. Death is an awful part of life. This is one of those times when you just put one foot in front of the other until it's
over. Just keep going. That is all you can do and that is all you must do put one foot in front of the other until today is over.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“If life is good then death must be bad is the way most people think, but this isn't really so. I am not for a moment trying to make sense of the death of a child or anyone who has not been granted his or her full measure of life. But generally speaking, is more really better or is there something about death that defines the essence of life itself?”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“Memory is light, illuminating and reminding me of so many things about my dad; reminding each of us who mourn a love both gone and yet still present, still warm and aglow even when skies are gray. If we remember, nothing can ever take our sunshine away. 8 Nobody Wants Your Crap To have more does not mean to be more. —Abraham Joshua Heschel”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“some people will disappoint you when you are in need and others will surprise you with their ability to show up.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us

“have seen more than a thousand dead bodies, and it is clear that the body is not the person—that there is so much more to us than our corporeal being. It is the impermanence of the body that has convinced me of the eternality of the soul. Physics tells us that energy never dies, it merely assumes a different form. I never feel this more deeply than when gazing upon a dead body, a vessel emptied of its life force, a force that must surely now exist elsewhere.”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body. The goal is to skid in broadside; tires smoking, body all dented, leaking fluids, and your fuel gauge on empty; thoroughly used up and worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Holy shit, what a ride!”
― Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift

“it’s very important to remember that when you reach out in pain, the people who really matter don’t mind, and the people who mind really don’t matter.”
― Steve Leder, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us