Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
—Jean Paul
Dreams are necessary to life.
—Anaïs Nin
When my old life died, it didn't go quietly. It detonated.
—Christina Lauren
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.
—Ronald Reagan
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.
—Meghan O'Rourke in The Long Goodbye
Over and above any spring we may know, outside our windows or in our hearts, there is the illimitable sweep of God's concern for his creation and his creatures; comprehending both suffering and beatitude, and transcending both. No one who has been spared—certainly not I—dare say to the afflicted that they are blessed in their affliction, or dare offer comfort in universal terms for particular griefs. Yet one can dimly see and humbly say that suffering is an integral and essential part of our human drama. That it falls upon one and all in differing degrees and belongs to God's purpose for us here on earth, so that in the end, all the experience of living has to teach us is to say: Thy will be done. To say it standing before a cross; itself signifying the suffering of God in the person of a Man, and the redemption of a Man in the person of God. The greatest sorrow and the greatest joy co-existing on Golgotha.
—Malcolm Muggeridge in Something Beautiful for God
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible conclusions.
—Chögyam Trungpa in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
What was it about life now? The people who weren't present always seemed to be more important than the people who were.
—Elin Hilderbrand in Beautiful Day
Sometimes you have to let go of the picture of what you thought life would be like and learn to find joy in the story you are actually living.
—Rachel Marie Martin in The Brave Art of Motherhood
Sometimes the risk of what bad things could happen keeps us from experiencing all the good things life has to offer.
—Vi Keeland in Rebel Heir
What's important is people. The people who love us, who need us, who make us feel emotion. That's what's important in life.
—Helen Hardt in Possession
One of the hardest things to accept when someone you love dies is that life goes on.
—Linda Castillo in Long Lost
In a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.
—Madeline Miller in Circe
I guess I just realized how everything we do affects not only our lives, but people around us, too. It sucks that one weak moment could change the entire course of someone's life.
—Cindi Madsen in All the Broken Pieces
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.
—Louise Erdrich in The Painted Drum