Suzanne > Suzanne's Quotes

“People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words, and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we don't know at all that it is the same with others.”
― Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy, and Triumph

“Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It's light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you've hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you've seen the worst and the best-- well, that sort of love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.”
― Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot

“We go to school to learn what books to read for the rest of our lives.”
― Robert Frost

“Come sit on my lap,' she said. Soon, very soon, he would think himself too big for lap-sitting. He got down from his chair and she picked him up; he was solid as anything. She held him close and swayed her body a little, like a cradle rocking, and soon he looked at her with the lovely solemnity that seemed to be a hallmark of their Jack Tyler, and said, ' I could prob'ly have a deviled egg now.”
― Jan Karon, Come Rain or Come Shine

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”
― Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

“How beautiful were the evenings of the Masai Reserve when after sunset we arrived at the river or the water-hole where we were to outspan, travelling in a long file. The plains with the thorn trees on them were already quite dark, but the air was filled with clarity,—and over our heads, to the West, a single star which was to grow big and radiant in the course of the night was now just visible, like a silver point in the sky of citrine topaz. The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees.”
― Isak Dinesen

“Everybody has a home team: It’s the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It’s the people who, near or far, know everything that’s wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets, who get themselves a glass of water without asking when they’re at your house. These are the people who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“But anyhow it's over. But I am not as happy as I thought I'd be because when something you have dreaded comes to an end there's a sense of anticlimax, like dust in the mouth. All the crashing ruin, the falling and tumbling, are over, but the dust is horrible. They say it won't happen to me again but I expect they only say it to comfort me. But I must think it won't. I must be like the people who plant gardens and build houses all over again where the earthquake has been. At the back of their minds they know there may be another 'quake but with the front of their minds they plant gardens.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“...your God is a trinity. There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, 'Lord, have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.' Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these, you will do well.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that the small flowered pattern was only a little lighter gray than the background. The dress came down to her ankles, and he strong, broad, bare feet moved quickly and deftly over the floor. Her thin, steel-gray hair was gathered in a sparse wispy knot at the back of her head. Strong, freckled arms were bare to the elbow, and her hands were chubby and delicate, like those of a plump little girl. She looked out into the sunshine. Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“They had buried him under our elm tree, they said -- yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.”
― Willie Morris, My Dog Skip

“I am learning forgiveness is not often a single, shining event but a continual, repetitive act. A letting go, followed by another, and another.”
― Seth Haines, Coming Clean: A Story of Faith

“To ask for relief from God—this is human. To pray through the pain, to live in it instead of numbing yourself to it, to subjugate your will to the will of God, even in the face of potential suffering—this is what it means to be like Jesus. This is what it means to yield to the mystery.”
― Seth Haines, Coming Clean: A Story of Faith

“Forgiveness, both its extension and receipt, requires a lower, humble position before both God and man. Forgiveness, both its extension and receipt, is not the natural inclination of man, and I must fight for it.”
― Seth Haines, Coming Clean: A Story of Faith

“There are so many distractions, I think. Commerce, materialism, entertainment, the endless chase of perfection—aren’t these also ways to avoid the restlessness rattling in our bones? Aren’t these just another way to numb? Aren’t these another sleight of hand? We become entranced people, zombies longing for the stuff of earth without thought of the truest perfect—the unity of home.”
― Seth Haines, Coming Clean: A Story of Faith

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Rom. 12:2).”
― Seth Haines, Coming Clean: A Story of Faith

“And Polly did n't think she had done much; but it was one of the little things which are always waiting to be done in this world of ours, where rainy days come so often, where spirits get out of tune, and duty won't go hand in hand with pleasure. Little things of this sort are especially good work for little people; a kind little thought, an unselfish little act, a cheery little word, are so sweet and comfortable, that no one can fail to feel their beauty and love the giver, no matter how small they are. Mothers do a deal of this sort of thing, unseen, unthanked, but felt and remembered long afterward, and never lost, for this is the simple magic that binds hearts together, and keeps home happy.”
― Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl

“When you feel out of sorts, try to make some one else happy, and you will soon be so yourself.”
― Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl

“...I think that woman can do a great deal for each other if they will only stop fearing what ‘people will think’ and take a hearty interest in whatever is going to fit their sisters and themselves to deserve and enjoy the rights God gave them. There are so many ways in which this can be done that I wonder they don’t see and improve them.”
― Louisa May Alcott, An Old Fashioned Girl

“There was a sense of gravity and richness to his teaching because you knew he really believed what he was saying.”
― Winn Collier, A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message

“Eugene saw that God-part of people. He saw that and defined me in that way. The other stuff didn't define me. That was astounding. -Cuba Odneal”
― Winn Collier, A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message

“Quit being so busy and learn quiet, to quit talking so much and learn silence.”
― Winn Collier, A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message

“These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“There’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in this world—a web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people…”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth’s exact whereabouts and essential properties,” wrote Nabokov. “Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched.” Tolstoy sought the truth in two ways: as a fiction writer and as a moral preacher. He was more powerful in the former but kept being drawn back to the latter. And somehow, it’s this struggle, between (as Nabokov put it) “the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral,” that makes us feel Tolstoy as a moral-ethical giant. It’s as if he resorts to fiction only when he can’t help it and, having to make the sinful indulgence really count, uses it to ask only the biggest questions and answer these with supreme, sometimes lacerating honesty”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“My world had for some years been Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet