Homelessness is not just about having a job or an apartment. Too often homelessness is due to a disordered mind.
Good and bad stuff happens to us every day. It’s how you handle it, and what you do about it, that counts. You can’t just let it break you. You have to keep fighting. And guilt and regrets get us nowhere.
I kept telling myself it was just temporary, but one day temporary becomes your whole life. You wake up, and you’re not twenty or twenty-seven anymore, you’re thirty-eight and you’ve given up all your dreams. I don’t want to do that again. That’s why I came here. From now on, I want things to be different, and this was the first step. I want to make decisions, not just float along letting life happen to me. I want more than that.
She was so full of holes now, she was like a Swiss cheese.
We have a strong moral system here, based on family values.
They both knew that the Massachusetts rape shield laws prevented defense attorneys from attacking a victim on the issue of consent. But they could attack her on other issues, like sexual history or reputation, which scared some victims off from reporting a rape.
They’re all special, but no one gets special treatment.
They’re all special, but no one gets special treatment. It wouldn’t be fair to the others.
As the director of one of the agencies providing free mental health services says, the Audubon Society spends more time, care, and money counting birds than we do counting homeless people.
It makes you realize how small you are, and no matter what you plan, God has a bigger idea, and you’re not the one in charge.
Part of being an adult, someone told me once, is accepting your parents as they are, with all their failings.
I fear that once you put weapons in men’s hands, they don’t let go of them easily.
Emptying the ocean with a thimble again, our thimbles so tiny, and the ocean of need so huge.
And there are programs in every city designed to assist them to get off the streets, or so they say. But in truth only the most functional among the homeless are able to access these programs. Lines are endless, forms are impossible to decipher, qualifications can’t be met, standards don’t apply.
Some people are just different, even in the same family.
It was March in the Napa Valley, just under sixty miles north of San Francisco, and Joy Lammenais’s favorite time of year. The rolling hills were a brilliant emerald green, which would fade once the weather grew warmer, and get dry and brittle in the summer heat. But for now, everything was fresh and new, and the vineyards stretched for miles across the Valley. Visitors compared it to Tuscany in Italy, and some to France.
Whatever age you are,” her mother said tartly, “age is just a number, and numbers have no power over you, unless you allow them to. You can feel ‘too old’ at any age, if you let yourself. You’re never too old or too young for anything, you’re just the right age.
I think that’s how life works. Just when you think you have it all set up and perfectly arranged, someone sneezes, or God blows on it, and all the building blocks come tumbling down.
Every day, good stuff and bad stuff happens to us. It’s what you do about it and how you handle it that matters.
We owe it to ourselves to allow the healing to happen and move on. And even my life is going to be better now because of you. Everybody has something they can beat themselves up for. It’s just not worth the energy to do it.