Reflective Nonfiction Quotes

“My reasons? Michael’s relationship with God is real whether or not God is the transcendent power represented in the Bible.”
― George Critchlow, The Lifer and the Lawyer: A Story of Punishment, Penitence, and Privilege

“Strife and disagreement are givens—and lawyers are usually at the front line.”
― Mark C. Zauderer, Counsel, the Courtroom Is Open: Lessons from More Than a Half-Century in Law and Life

“It made me realize that I had to leave my old life behind, because nobody but me cared about it.”
― Mark C. Zauderer, Counsel, the Courtroom Is Open: Lessons from More Than a Half-Century in Law and Life

“The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know.”
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― Mark C. Zauderer, Counsel, the Courtroom Is Open: Lessons from More Than a Half-Century in Law and Life

“The path is always adjusted to the state of the heart. When the heart is restless, the path becomes obscured. When the heart is sincere, the path becomes illuminated. When the heart is surrendered, the path becomes effortless.”
― Ayisha Bhatti, THOUGHTS UNATTENDED: On the truths that surface in stillness

“The inner life, given genuine attention, reveals a self of surprising depth — complex, contradictory, occasionally difficult, and irreducibly valuable.”
― Ayisha Bhatti, The Unhurried Soul: Learning to Live from the Inside Out

“Wisdom lives in silence. Not the wisdom of accumulated information, which is only knowledge, but the wisdom that comes from sitting with experience long enough to understand what it was actually teaching. Hurry gives us events. Silence gives us meaning.”
― Ayisha Bhatti, The Unhurried Soul: Learning to Live from the Inside Out

“This is perhaps the central and most consistent cruelty of avoidance — that it inflates what it fears. The difficult conversation, approached with honesty and genuine care, is rarely as devastating as the months of anticipation suggested. The painful feeling, when finally allowed to surface and move through, is rarely as overwhelming as the years of outrunning it implied.”
― Ayisha Bhatti, THE SELF WAS SIMPLY IN THE WAY

“Doubt is not the shadow that appears when faith is absent. It is the shadow that appears when faith is reaching for more light.”
― Ayisha Bhatti, THE SELF WAS SIMPLY IN THE WAY

“There is a ground. A knowing, below the feeling, that this day — this particular, unrepeatable, never-to-come-again arrangement of hours — has been given. Not happened. Given. And that the One who gave it is present in every hour of it, available in every moment, closer than the heartbeat.”
― Ayisha Bhatti, From The Core: The Heart, the Light, and the Life You Were Meant to Live