Real love is not to desire a person but to desire their happiness – sometimes even at the expense of our own happiness. Real love is to expand our own capacity for tolerance and caring, to actively seek another’s well-being. All else is simply a charade of self-interest.
For the first time I realized that gratitude and joy were connected, like conjoined twins. I couldn’t be happy because I wasn’t grateful and I wasn’t grateful because I wasn’t allowing myself to be. I was too busy hunting the next prize to appreciate the prize already at home. What I had was never enough, not because of the deficit in what I had but because of the deficit in me.
I once heard a writer say, ‘It’s easy to write a novel, you just slit your wrist and let it bleed on the pages.’ She was right... Sophocles and Freud believed that we are defined by our fears. There’s a lot of truth to that. When you share your greatest fears, your vulnerability, we bond in that honesty. We connect with each other and we don’t feel so alone. And that’s what books are really about. Connecting.
As you grow older, Michael, you’ll learn an important lesson – that most people spend their entire lives wishing for a second chance to do what they should have done right the first time.
Bad memories can attach themselves like barnacles to the hulls of our lives. And, like barnacles, they have a disproportionately large amount of drag.
I’ve always believed that we don’t choose the life we want, we choose the life we think we deserve. We self-sabotage as a way to punish ourselves.” “Why would we punish ourselves? Doesn’t the world punish us enough?” “Why wouldn’t we? We live in a world that is always making us work for love. It’s cause and effect.
They are like pythons in the jungle. The smallest child can crush a python egg. But let the snake hatch and grow and the python with squeeze and devour the child.
Humans need to belong. Humans have always needed tribes. Today we find tribes in family or clubs or religion. What happens when we fall out of them? I suppose, in prehistoric times, it was fatal to be cast out of a tribe, to be exiled or excommunicated from the group, away from the people we love and need. Exile from the tribe is a form of execution.
Romance novels are all about desire and happily-ever-after, but happily-ever-after doesn’t come from desire – at least not the kind portrayed in pulp romances. Real love is not to desire a person but to desire their happiness – sometimes even at the expense of our own happiness. Real love is to expand our own capacity for tolerance and caring, to actively seek another’s well-being. All else is simply a charade of self-interest.
It’s easy to hate the game when your losing.
Just like our story, the original Christmas tales were stories of searching, not so much for the lost, as for the familiar. Mary and Joseph sought in Bethlehem- the home of their familial ancestry- a place to start their own family; the three kings from the East journeyed beneath the sentinel star to find the King of Kings; and the shepherds sought a child in a place most familiar to them: a manger.
It’s dark times like these that present us the canvas where we paint our own greatness.
Trauma has a way of indelibly linking the incidentals to the profound.
If you love only those who give you happy news, you will never love those worthy of your trust. For those who love you will speak truth, and truth is not always happy, but it is always a blessing.
All women like chocolate, it’s like female catnip.
Why is it that we so easily confide secrets to strangers that we so carefully hide from ourselves?
The only true love is grace. All else is a counterfeit.
The well from which we receive grace is only filled by sharing it with others. – Charles James’s Diary.
Is that it?” Jack asked. “No. That is the Xing zheng yuan Hui an Xun fang Shu.” “I was just going to say that,” Tessa said.
In the end, it is not by knowledge that we make our journeys but by hope and faith: hope that our walk will be worthy of our steps and faith that we are going somewhere. And only when we come to the end of our journeys do we truly understand that every step of the way we were walking on water.