Ashley

“embracing one's wholeness makes life more demanding--because once you do that, you must live your whole life. One of the most painful discoveries I made in the midst of the dark woods of depression was that a part of me wanted to stay depressed. As long as I clung to this living death, life became easier; little was expected of me, certainly not serving others.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

“I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor

“The best is perhaps what we understand the least.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven