Wendy Broyles > Wendy's Quotes

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
― Philo

“Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“It is remarkable, the lines that connect people. You can strike up a conversation with someone, a stranger even, and discover that you have a friend in common, that your aunts were from the same town, or that his best friend can grease your way into Bhutan. It seems on those occasions that we are all like strands of DNA, spun around each other in a double helix.”
― Francis Slakey, To the Last Breath: A Memoir of Going to Extremes

“Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“My life - my personality, my habits, even my speech - is a combination of the books I choose to read, the people I choose to listen to, and the thoughts I choose to tolerate in my mind”
― Andy Andrews

“Because the world isn’t divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary. As long as you have a soul and free will, you can be anything, do anything, choose anything.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Aim higher in case you fall short.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how hard she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, "We'll take it.”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“This isn't what I expected."
"What?-Life?”
― Jenny B. Jones, There You'll Find Me

“To truly try means to accept God's love, his healing, to accept the world can be ugly, but your heart doesn't have to be. It takes courage, Finley the warrior. You haven't held on to your anger and bitterness in search of healing, but as a banner of your hurt. Because it's real and visible and strong, " she said. "But so is God's love and so are those arms he's holding out for you.”
― Jenny B. Jones, There You'll Find Me

“You can't walk on water holding all that weight, it just makes you sink right down. Let it go.”
― Jenny B. Jones, There You'll Find Me

“Don't hang on to old hurts. You can spend your years blaming God, blaming other people. But in the end it was a choice.”
― Jenny B. Jones

“We need creative license with the fictional narratives that become our memories. Anthologized, these are the tales that become the story of your life.”
― Danielle Ganek, The Summer We Read Gatsby

“It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“But as my father told him, and as anyone who reads regularly might agree, the only thing that has to be similar from night to night is the act of turning pages. Everything else changed as soon as we picked up a new book, plunging deep into a new landscape with unfamiliar faces”
― Alice Ozma, The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared

“Just breathing isn't living!”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna

“I wish I could prescribe her--and buy her--as I would a box of pills;--though if there gets to be many of her in the world, you and I might as well go to ribbon-selling and ditch-digging for all the money we'd get out of nursing and doctoring”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna