Ms_ Joy

“The Source of all things, the luminescence, has more forms than heaven’s stars, sure. And one good thought is all it takes to make it shine. But a single mistake can burn down a forest in your heart, hiding all the stars, in all the skies. And while a mistake’s still burning, ruined love or lost faith can make you think you’re done, and you can’t go on. But it’s not true. It’s never true. No matter what you do, no matter where you’re lost, the luminescence never leaves you. Any good thing that dies inside can rise again, if you want it hard enough. The heart doesn’t know how to quit, because it doesn’t know how to lie. You lift your eyes from the page, fall into the smile of a perfect stranger, and the searching starts all over again. It’s not what it was. It’s always different. It’s always something else. But the new forest that grows back in a scarred heart is sometimes wilder and stronger than it was before the fire. And if you stay there, in that shine within yourself, that new place for the light, forgiving everything and never giving up, sooner or later you’ll always find yourself right back there where love and beauty made the world: at the beginning. The beginning. The beginning.”
― Gregory David Roberts, The Mountain Shadow

“Forgiving yourself, believing in yourself and choosing to love yourself are the best gifts one could receive.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“A counsellor at the treatment centre where I got clean, herself a woman in recovery, surprised me when she said, ‘How clever of you to find drugs. Well done, you found a way to keep yourself alive.’ This made me feel quite tearful. I suppose because this woman, Jackie, didn’t judge me or tell me I was stupid or tubthumpingly declare that ‘drugs kill’. No, she told me that I had done well by finding something that made being me bearable… To be acknowledged as a person who was in pain and fighting to survive in my own muddled-up and misguided way made me feel optimistic and understood. It is an example of the compassion addicts need from one another in order to change.”
― Russell Brand, Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

“Even if you cannot change all the people around you, you can change the people you choose to be around. Life is too short to waste your time on people who don’t respect, appreciate, and value you. Spend your life with people who make you smile, laugh, and feel loved.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart