Melanie Shankle > Quotes

“Sometimes the best families are the ones God builds using unexpected pieces of our hearts.”
― Melanie Shankle

“Real motherhood is different. It's better and it's messier and it's more complicated. It will break your heart and make you laugh harder than you ever imagined. You find yourself alternating between feeling like your friends talked you into some sort of pyramid scheme so you could share in their misery and thinking this is the most fulfilling thing you've ever done in your life.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings: Catching the Light at Every Turn

“God gives us these raw, little people, and we have to form them and mold them and teach them how to operate in society. And if we get a glimpse of all the ugliness that lies right beneath our own polished surface? Well, then, there's a humbling lesson too. It's those moments when I realize I have to extend grace to Caroline as she figures these things out by trial and error in the same way God lavishes me with mercy, even as I make the same mistakes over and over again.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings: Catching the Light at Every Turn

“There are probably only a handful of times in our lives when someone who will change us forever walks in—when we find someone we can love with our whole hearts, who will challenge us and shape us and make us feel like the world is safer and brighter just because they are in it. A person who loves us for exactly who we are, yet teaches us to be better because of who they are and how they live their life.”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship

“When I look in his eyes, I don’t see perfection. I don’t see a love story that would necessarily be something people would watch on a big screen and dream about. I see someone who will fight for me and protect me and love me in spite of all the ways I am still a wreck. I see home. Wherever he is. That’s my home.”
― Melanie Shankle, The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life

“Not one thing we've done changes that we are his. That he created us and loves us with a love more fierce and loyal than any we will ever know. He isn't looking for perfection. He's looking for humble hearts that know we are nothing without his lavish grace.”
― Melanie Shankle, The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life

“His love wrote the first chapters of my life and is the reason I never had to wonder if I was adored.”
― Melanie Shankle, Church of the Small Things: The Million Little Pieces That Make Up a Life

“I watched her with the crab as she ignored all my admonitions that the poor crab just needed to be set free if he was to have any chance of surviving. And God showed up there on that beach to teach me a lesson. Nothing survives when it's being smothered. Life, real life, requires being free to move about in the great big ocean, not being cradled in little hot hands that will stifle independence and creativity. We can't keep our crabs (or our kids) in a bucket and expect them to go far in life.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings: Catching the Light at Every Turn

“I think it can be easy to settle for less than you deserve just because less is right in front of you and the best may still be unseen. But I guarantee there are many women in marriages who are so lonely that they long for their single days when at least they had the hope of finding someone who would understand them, love them, and care for them.”
― Melanie Shankle, The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life

“...motherhood is the thing in a woman's life that catches her by total and complete surprise.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings: Catching the Light at Every Turn

“Friends are God’s way of apologizing for your relatives.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings

“And you know what I realize now? That we're all waiting on something, no matter where we are in life. It's the human condition.”
― Melanie Shankle, The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life

“When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares. HENRI J. M. NOUWEN”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship

“...true success and prosperity comes when you are right where God wants you to be, doing what He wants you to do.”
― Melanie Shankle, Church of the Small Things: The Million Little Pieces That Make Up a Life

“Our job as mothers is to do the best we can to teach our children that life is better and friendships are richer when we treat others with kindness, when we remember to share, and when we use nice words. To remember that every person we come in contact with may have a few cracks in their hearts even if we can’t see them and that love is always the best response. But”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings

“Because that's what friends do. They speak the truth when you've lost your way, pick you up and brush you off , tell you that you're going to make it to the other side, and cheer you on until you get there.”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship

“And it made me realize that we often find our people at an early age. The ones who encourage us, love us, and share our weird desire to play with sliced dill pickles in the cafeteria and sing commercial jingles. The years may change our faces, our bodies, and our lives, but there are connections we make early on that remain part of who we are forever.”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship

“But there are a few people in your life who become so much a part of you that it feels like you're missing a limb when they're gone.”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship

“friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow. AUTHOR UNKNOWN”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship

“As a new mom, your life changes overnight. Your priorities change, you forget to brush your teeth, you aren’t sure how you’re ever going to balance all your new responsibilities, and it’s overwhelming. Not to mention that your body that used to be almost purely recreational has become much like a dairy cow but not as delicate and petite.”
― Melanie Shankle, The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life

“In a lot of ways home improvement is like marriage. It’s not glamorous. It can take a lot of hard work and effort. There are days it feels like it might be easier to burn the whole thing to the ground and start all over again. Then you remember how much you love the house or your husband and you recommit yourself to what it takes to see the whole thing through. Even when it might involve paintbrushes and compromise and sanding and scraping all the rough edges. And when you look back on a tough patch a few months after the worst has passed, you don’t remember all the hard work and the tears. You just have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve made something beautiful.”
― Melanie Shankle, The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life

“I believe there is no greater act of marital love or martyrdom than attending an event involving your spouse’s family without your spouse in attendance.”
― Melanie Shankle, The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life

“Sometimes you can look back on times in your life and know that God was guiding you even when you didn't know you were supposed to be listening.”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship

“Anne Lamott says in Traveling Mercies, “I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools—friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty—and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings

“Of course there was no way my mind could have comprehended all that this friendship would become. There are probably only a handful of times in our lives when someone who will change us forever walks in-- when we find someone we can love with our whole hearts, who will challenge us and shape us and make us feel like the world is safer and brighter just because they are in it. A person who loves us for exactly who we are, yet teaches us to be better because of who they are and how they live their life.”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship

“There is something incredibly healing about getting to be the thing in someone else’s life that you wished you’d had in your own.”
― Melanie Shankle, Here Be Dragons: Treading the Deep Waters of Motherhood, Mean Girls, and Generational Trauma

“Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing. ELIZABETH GILBERT”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship

“In short, I was like Ron Burgundy and in “a glass case of emotion.”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship

“When I look back on the sixteen years Perry and I have been married, I can see the places where we've made each other better. There are parts of us etched into each other like the rings in the trunk of a tree. We've grown, we've changed, we've been forever marked. And ultimately, we are so much better together than either of us would be on our own.”
― Melanie Shankle, The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life

“I believe that is what happened during this time in my life. God had other things for me, and he knew me so much better than I knew myself, so he moved me along to a new place. It certainly didn't lessen the pain at the time, but if I've learned anything along the way, it's that sometimes the best lessons are the ones that hurt the most.”
― Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship