Charles Dean

“Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.”
― Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life : Welcoming the soul and weaving community in a wounded world

“Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.”
― T.S. Eliot

“We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.”
― Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense