Discover new books on Goodreads
Meet your next favorite book
Vanessa Johnson
https://www.goodreads.com/vanessaannajohnson
“The legend of my mom is that she can’t be stopped. Not when you hit her. Not when a whole country full of goons puts her in a cage. Not even if you make her poor and try to kill her slowly in the little-by-little poison of sadness. And the legend is true. I think because she’s fixed her eyes on something beyond the rivers of blood, to a beautiful place on the other side. How else would anybody do it?”
― Everything Sad Is Untrue
― Everything Sad Is Untrue
“Dear reader, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Schererazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last.
Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others.
He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.”
― Everything Sad Is Untrue
Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others.
He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.”
― Everything Sad Is Untrue
“That you are not mine to possess, that you are not mine to craft and shape, that you are a gift to me, means that you can also be a divine presence to me. When you call to me in your need, that is God's call to me as well. The space I give you to grow and flourish becomes also the space for my own growth and flourishing.”
― Motherhood: A Confession
― Motherhood: A Confession
“The Bible is not a privileged possession of Protestants: all believers, absolutely, must be nourished on Scripture. ... We are constantly bombarded with messages of every kind. Only God's Word, passed on to us in a special way in Scripture, has the necessary depth, clarity, and authority to help us find our way. Only Scripture enables us to discover the truth, not as something abstract, but as God's presence in our lives and the very specific way he offers us day after day.
...
This simple spiritual experience of discovering Holy Scripture as light, encouragement, and strength for our path today--for Scripture has an authority possessed by no human word, no human reasoning--is one all Christians can and should have.”
― The Way of Trust and Love - A Retreat Guided By St. Therese of Lisieux
...
This simple spiritual experience of discovering Holy Scripture as light, encouragement, and strength for our path today--for Scripture has an authority possessed by no human word, no human reasoning--is one all Christians can and should have.”
― The Way of Trust and Love - A Retreat Guided By St. Therese of Lisieux
“If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Goodreads Librarians Group
— 333456 members
— last activity 0 minutes ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
Vanessa’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Vanessa’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
51 books
|
106 friends
789 books
|
127 friends
1,890 books
|
372 friends
1,911 books
|
100 friends
4,088 books
|
110 friends
773 books
|
124 friends
556 books
|
22 friends
1,040 books
|
37 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Vanessa
Lists liked by Vanessa