Emily

“This mingling of life and death, rising and falling is so strange that we cannot even know where we truly are, for our perceptions are so sundered from each other that we can’t tell what is real. On the one hand, we live in a holy agreement with God; when we feel the Divine Presence in our lives, we set our wills, our intellects, our souls, and our strength to following God. Then we hate the arrogant stirrings in our minds, all that causes us to fall away from God, physically and spiritually. But then again, we lose sight of the Divine sweetness, and we fall once more into such darkness that we stumble into all manner of sorrows and troubles. We can only comfort ourselves that we never give our deepest permission for the trouble and sorrow to enter our lives; the strength of Christ our Protector guards our inmost beings. We revolt against the darkness, our minds filled with groaning, enduring the pain and sadness, praying for the time when the Divine Presence will once again be revealed to us. This is the medley of human life: faith and sorrow, insight and darkness, joy and agony, singing in counterpart through our days. But God wants us to know that through it all the Divine Presence is the melody that never changes.”
― Julian of Norwich, All Shall Be Well: A Modern-Language Version of the Revelation of Julian of Norwich

“I keep turning away from speaking of your letter. I feel--to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Is the world as it’s depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them. Or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess (and thus which possesses them).”
― Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History