Catherine Burns > Quotes

“Just walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy. And after all these mortal human years, love is up to the challenge.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“A friend of mine once told me that the grass is greener where you water it: I had forgotten to water the grass.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“This is what I know. In the deepest, blackest night of despair, if you can get just one pinhole of light…all of grace rushes in.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“Brave men are always afraid. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the willingness—the guts, if you like—to face the fear.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“I stopped asking for time, and thought about time well spent.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“She was God’s gift to our family. I described how she’s buried on our farm, and when our family got together to try to think of what to put on her tombstone, we found this saying: “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” I said to the judge, “Love is that candle. Love does not seek another death. Love brings life and healing and wholeness.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“But we look away at our own peril. For what wonders await us when we don't turn away. Sometimes it is easier to try to make sense of the world one story at a time.
And when we dare to listen, we remember that there is no "other," there is only us, and what we have in common will always be greater than what separates us.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“I try asking myself, Okay, if everything fell apart, if everything went to hell the worst way possible, would I think to myself, I am so glad I did not let myself experience joy or enthusiasm in the good moments because it really protected me from the future?

No. Life doesn't work like that. Nothing protects you.

So I practice enjoying.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible

“I’m thinking about the fact that we imagine that we live in the light. We imagine we can foresee what’s gonna happen. We imagine we can control everything: I’m gonna do this, and I’m gonna do that. But the reality is, almost all of us are just stumbling along in the dark, searching, trying to reach some kind of home, while we’re juggling all these balls and hopefully on most days keeping them afloat.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“that when we can celebrate and truly own what it is that makes us different, we’re able to find the source of our greatest creative power.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth: This Is a True Story

“I left the stage gratified, hot-faced, exorcised, thrilled, thinking, I would do this again.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible

“what we have in common will always be greater than what separates us. Catherine Burns”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“Orwell’s famous lesson, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth

“I was perhaps as intensely naïve to think I could get a job working with the Yankees. But the lesson to me is that with a great deal of persistence and a little bit of common sense, even if the thing you’re chasing may not exist, you can sometimes will it into being.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth

“But the next day I felt this kind of joy, like I was shining. I think I’ve heard them call it “the peace that passes understanding.” I had gotten to see that there was this completely random love in the universe. That it could be unconditional. And that some of it was for me.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“I stopped praying to get better, and I thought about the thing that I’d want. If I could pray for one thing, it was to feel worthy of that love that I hadn’t felt for so long.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“when we dare to face the unknown, we usually discover that we have more grit and tenacity than we thought. And we often land in a place that we couldn’t even have imagined when we started out.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” I said to the judge, “Love is that candle. Love does not seek another death. Love brings life and healing and wholeness.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“I was thinking about this tree, which had been growing there for countless years, season in and season out. Every year producing its fruit, shedding its leaves, producing new leaves, and just carrying on its business in nature, oblivious of the big city around it. Oblivious of the hatred and the anger and the injustice and the wars, the depredation and the hunger and everything that goes on. Just simply being in nature. And I put my arms around that tree, and I wept.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“Initially I was upset and repulsed by these rampant lies, but as I spent months with them in that locked compound, I began to understand their predicament, and I felt such empathy. They were so easy to love, but impossible to trust. They were sincere, but they lied.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“Prince”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth

“She showed me beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no matter how much the chips may be stacked against you, there is a way to hold your head high.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“And so here I am seven years later. I’m a highly organized pattern of mass and energy, one of 7 billion. In any objective accounting of the universe, I’m practically nothing, and soon I’ll cease to be. But the certainty of my own demise, the certainty of my own death, somehow makes my life more meaningful, and I think that is as it should be. I find myself born into this universe. It’s a wonderful place. It’s a strange place. It’s also a scary and sometimes lonely place. And every day in my work, I try to discern through its noisy manifestation, its people, dogs, trees, mountains, stars—everything I love—I try to discern the eternal music of the spheres.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“And you know, every time I’ve come to a major faulty conclusion in life, the man comes right after who will help me live it out.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“drawn to the Celtic idea of thin places—“thin places,” “thin times”—the idea that there are places we can experience where the veil between heaven and earth is worn thin, where the temporal and the transcendent seem to touch.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible

“No matter how horrible your day is, and no matter how scary your night is, everything can turn on a dime. When there's a knock on the door. And music, and joy, arrive. - Taylor Negron, California Gothic”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“The great storyteller Frank O’Connor defined it best, saying once that every good story should end, in spirit, with the exact same words: “And everything that ever happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth

“The horror of North Korea is beyond famine and gulags. To survive there, real human beings have to not only believe in the lies of the Great Leader but also perpetuate them, which is a mental torture. It’s a world where all citizens are complicit in the deprivation of their own humanity.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

“The number-one quality of all great storytellers is their willingness to be vulnerable, to tell on themselves in front of thousands. Each story told is a gift to the listeners.”
― Catherine Burns, The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown