Jennifer Fulwiler > Quotes

“The Catechism explained that praying for the souls of the dead is a tradition going back to the first Christians and to the Jews before them. On the walls of the catacombs, where the earliest Christians worshipped, there were scrawled prayers for friends who’d died during persecutions. The living sent their love for the deceased into the spiritual world, like adding water to a stream that would eventually float their lost friends home.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Something other than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It

“Resistance is that temptation that leads you to sit back and criticize others instead of following your own life’s calling; it’s the lost running shoes and malfunctioning alarms that make it so hard to start that new workout routine; it’s the fights that break out among well-meaning people in a powerful ministry at church; it’s the force that has stopped countless artists throughout the ages, repelling them from their work like two similarly charged magnets.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“There’s nothing like nine months of pregnancy and eighteen hours of childbirth to make you see that men and women are really, really different. Men can’t gestate and birth new human life. Women can. There’s a huge area of activity that the sexes do not share. Whether the author of life is God or simply Nature, it seemed to declare that people can have vastly different roles, unavailable to certain other people, and yet all be valued equally.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Something other than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It

“You can’t put your own life on hold over the long term; eventually, you’ll reach a breaking point where you simply have to take care of yourself. And if you perceive that tending to your own needs can never go hand-in-hand with serving, you’ll stop serving.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“When you’re trying to start a business with your blue flame, laser focus on producing. Make a plan, but spend the minimum amount of time on it.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Your Blue Flame: Drop the Guilt and Do What Makes You Come Alive

“Remember this,” he said. “Where there is no unity, there is no God. God is always calling us to connection, to unity, and if we don’t have that, we are not walking with God.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“It occurred to me now that when we let Resistance hold us back, we’re not the only ones who suffer. Other people lose out, too.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“I thought again of those messages that attack women, from both within and without, that whisper that we shouldn’t pursue our dreams because we’re not talented enough or we’re too old or too young or we don’t have the perfect lives for it. It occurred to me now that when we let Resistance hold us back, we’re not the only ones who suffer. Other people lose out, too.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“I was slowly coming to adopt the new mentality that when you put connections with other people first, things tend to work out.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“There is a tendency with anyone who loves any kind of work to fantasize that if you just had endless time for it, you’d be able to achieve perfection in this field. Yet what I’d discovered is that when you put love first, not only does your life improve, but your work improves.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“I tried to dismiss it as an overstatement, but it kept ringing in my soul: Maybe Resistance is trying to stop women from changing the world.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“una sociedad solo podía respetar la vida humana si respetaba el acto mismo que crea la vida humana.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Un encuentro inesperado

“Igor Stravinsky said that “the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself.” I’d come across the quote years before, but I only now got it. When water is confined in a narrow space like a tube or a ravine, it will rush forward with power; when it has infinite room to expand, it becomes a puddle. The same thing happens with our creative juices. If I had had perfect control over my”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“This practice has given me a sense of inner freedom I never thought I could experience.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“when you put love first, not only does your life improve, but your work improves.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“outburst.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Something other than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It

“Where’s an area where I can handle the pain of the work better than the people around me? The area where you are more well equipped to suffer is the work you were made to do.”1 The area where you are more well equipped to suffer is the work you were made to do.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Your Blue Flame: Drop the Guilt and Do What Makes You Come Alive

“Here in Texas, that’s not how it works. When we threw ourselves on Slip’N Slides, we were met with a bone-crushingly hard ground that was sparsely covered by grass that had the consistency of old hay. As we slid down the yellow tarp for our three seconds of fun, we’d experience the familiar explosions of pain when previously undiscovered rocks or sticks jabbed into our internal organs. Then we’d slide off the end into fire ants.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Like Living Among Scorpions: One Woman's Quest to Survive Her Suburban Life

“Sometimes it felt like my current life was a macabre psychological experiment to see exactly where the mental breaking point was for someone with my temperament.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“He’d heard that I have a bunch of little kids now, and he just gushed about that. He said that he neglected his personal life for his work, and it was his greatest regret. There was this one line where he said something like, ‘I didn’t understand what actually matters in life until it was too late. Don’t make the same mistake I did.’ I keep reminding myself of that every time I worry about money lately.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“I tended to drift from one want or need to another, without pausing to ask if there was actually something we wanted or needed even more that would be a better use of our limited resources.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“I love people. I like being around them as astronauts like going to the moon: it's the kind of thrilling, beautiful, intense experience that makes life worth living but requires an extreme level of precise timing and planning so you don't die.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Your Blue Flame: Drop the Guilt and Do What Makes You Come Alive

“It is something you do, and were destined to do, that fills you with energy and adds love to the world.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Your Blue Flame: Drop the Guilt and Do What Makes You Come Alive

“When my next door neighbor says, “Nope, never seen a scorpion in my house!” is when things start feeling all Amityville Horror around here.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Like Living Among Scorpions: One Woman's Quest to Survive Her Suburban Life

“The daily problems I carried with me as I snapped each of these photos would be long forgotten. I needed to start making my big life choices with that perspective in mind.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“I had discovered that it was more of an alternative lifestyle than just another way to avoid pregnancy. It strengthened my marriage, made me rely on my faith more than I ever would have otherwise, and it had given me another gift as well, one that I never expected to receive.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“when you start getting the big titles and the nice accolades, at first it feels great. But it’s easy to get caught up in those externals—the things that impress people but don’t ultimately make you any better at what you’re giving back to the world. When you chase that kind of stuff, it eventually becomes an addiction.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“when you put connections with other people first, things tend to work out. You might face difficulties. You might experience suffering and loss. Like Yaya in her life as a single mother, things might not look exactly as you hoped they would. But you will never, ever regret putting love first.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“There was even some part of me, buried so deep in my subconscious that it resided next to secrets like my opinion that the Backstreet Boys' Millennium album was a masterpiece...”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“I’m not going to tell you that Jesus has all the answers. He is your only answer.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, Something other than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It