''What makes sense to me: pushing. Lists. Responsibility. Action, action, action. What’s changing my life: silence. Rest. Letting myself be fragile. Asking for help.''

''But as I learn to dwell in the silence of my own heart, I’m finding myself drawn to the silence of nature—of water, land, expanse. As I learn to trust the stillness I’ve been running from for so long, I’m finding that I crave more and more silence. I’m drawn back to the water, to the sound of the waves instead of the sounds of traffic and the blare of action and excitement.''

''What’s changing everything for me is a new understanding that we get to decide how we want to live. We get to shape our days and our weeks, and if we don’t, they’ll get shaped by the wide catch-all of “normal” and “typical,” and who wants that?''

''In seasons of deep transformation, silence will be your greatest guide. Even if it’s scary, especially if it’s scary, let silence be your anchor, your sacred space,your dwelling place. It’s where you will become used to your own voice, your agency, your authority. It’s where you will nurture that fledgling sense of authority, like a newborn deer on spindly fragile legs. Silence will become the incubator for your newfound spirit, keeping it safe, growing it steadily.''

''It’s when I’m alone and quiet that I feel my strength. I need more and more of it than I ever have, like a vitamin, like a safe house.'' '' when things are hard and painful and barbed at home, what a lovely thing it is to be loved at your work, right? What a lovely and dangerous thing.What an easy escape, into people who think you’re great and work that makes you feel valuable. I can master my laptop in a way that I cannot master parenting. I can control my publishing schedule and my deadlines in a way that I cannot control our marriage.''

''It is better to be loved than admired. It is better to be truly known and seen and taken care of by a small tribe than adored by strangers who think they know you in a meaningful way. We know that’s true. But many of us, functionally, have gotten that math wrong in one season or another.''

''It’s easier to be impressive to strangers than it is to be consistently kind behind the scenes. It’s easier to show up and be a hit for an hour than it is to get down on the floor with your kids when you’re so tired your eyes are screaming and bone-dry. It’s easier to be charming on a conference call than it is to traverse the distance between you and your spouse, the distance you created.''

''Sometimes being brave is being quiet. Being brave is getting off the drug of performance. For me, being brave is trusting that what my God is asking of me,what my family and community is asking from me, is totally different than what our culture says I should do.Sometimes, brave looks boring, and that’s totally, absolutely, okay.''

''I chose to be present over perfect, and that’s still what I choose today….It’s about learning to show up and let ourselves be seen just as we are,massively imperfect and weak and wild and flawed in a thousand ways, but still worth loving. It’s about realizing that what makes our lives meaningful is not what we accomplish, but how deeply and honestly we connect with the people in our lives, how wholly we give ourselves to the making of a better world, through kindness and courage.''

''Present is living with your feet firmly grounded in reality, pale and uncertain as it may seem. Present is choosing to believe that your own life is worth investing deeply in, instead of waiting for some rare miracle or fairy tale. Present means we understand that the here and now is sacred, sacramental, threaded through with divinity even in its plainness. Especially in its plainness.''

''Present over perfect living is real over image, connecting over comparing,meaning over mania, depth over artifice. Present over perfect living is the risky and revolutionary belief that the world God has created is beautiful and valuable on its own terms, and that it doesn’t need to be zhuzzed up and fancy in order to be wonderful.''

''In the silence, I have found love. I have found love, and peace, and stillness, and gratitude. I used to overwork in order to feel important. What I’m learning now is that feeling important to someone else isn’t valuable to me the way I thought it was. Feeling connected is very valuable. But feeling helpful to strangers doesn’t do it for me anymore.''

''Hold close to your essential self. Get to know it, the way you get to know everything in the world about someone you’re in love with, the way you know your child, their every freckle and preference and which cry means what.''

''You cannot be a mystic when you’re hustling all the time. You can’t be a poet when you start to speak in certainties. You can’t stay tender and connected when you hurl yourself through life like being shot out of a cannon, your very speed a weapon you wield to keep yourself safe.The natural world is so breathtakingly beautiful. People are so weird and awesome and loving and life-giving. Why, then, did I try so hard for so long to get away without feeling or living deeply?''

''Addiction to motion—or faking or busyness or obsessive eating or obsessive dieting or whatever it is for you—builds just a tiny, luscious buffer between you and . . . everything. So words that would hurt you when you’re stone-sober just don’t bother you after a glass or two of wine, or after you’ve lost three more pounds, or as long as chocolate or pizza can keep you company, keeping you safe and distant. But you take away those things and all of a sudden, you find many of your relationships very different than you originally believed. You feel everything. Everything.''

''That’s how it is when you leave these things behind—busyness, exhaustion,codependence, compulsive anything—you can see the cracks and brokennesses in your relationships for what they really are, and you realize that you can’t move forward the way you have been, that you have to either fix the cracks or let the connection break—those are the only two honest ways.''

''When you allow other people to determine your best choices; when you allow yourself to be carried along by what other people think your life should be, could be,must be; when you hand them the pen and tell them to write your story, you don’t get the pen back. Not easily anyway.''

''Do you know the sweetness of working hard and then stopping the working hard, realizing that your body and your spirit have carried you far enough and now they need to be tended to? I feel like a newborn in all this, blissful and delighted each time I take care of myself, like a new skill or a present.''

''Part of the crazy of it is that we don’t allow people to fall apart unless they’re massively successful. You can’t be just a normal lady with a normal job and burn yourself out—that’s only for bigshot people. And so the normal, exhausted, soul-starved people keep going, because we’re not special enough to burn out. Burnout is not reserved for the rich or the famous or the profoundly successful. It’s happening to so many of us, people across all kinds of careers and lifestyles.If you’re tired, you’re tired, no matter what. If the life you’ve crafted for yourself is too heavy, it’s too heavy, no matter if the people on either side of you are carrying more or less. You don’t have to have a public life or a particularly busy life in order to be terribly, dangerously depleted.''

''What would our lives be like if our days were studded by tiny, completely unproductive, silly, nonstrategic, wild and beautiful five-minute breaks,reminders that our days are for loving and learning and laughing, not for pushing and planning, reminders that it’s all about the heart, not about the hustle?''

''It’s been said a million times that the most important things aren’t things. But if we’re not careful, it seems, many of us find ourselves overwhelmed by all the stuff we have to manage, instead of focused on what we’re most passionate about—writing or making or painting or connecting with people.''

''How we live matters, and what you choose to own will shape your life,whether you choose to admit it or not. Let’s live lightly, freely, courageously, surrounded only by what brings joy, simplicity, and beauty.''

''What kills a soul? Exhaustion, secret keeping, image management.And what brings a soul back from the dead? Honesty, connection, grace.''

''Whatever you’ve achieved, wherever you’ve arrived—a dollar amount in the bank, a number on the scale, that award or promotion or perfect house—whatever it is, if in order to get there, you laid your soul down, believing it was unnecessary baggage, or an acceptable sacrifice, I’m here to tell you, with great love and tenderness, that you’re wrong; and that I’d love to take you by the hand, and walk back as far as we need to, down the road of your past,to find it,like a sweater you dropped walking to class, like a scarf that slipped off your shoulders unnoticed.''

''Here it is. Here’s the love. Here’s the love: it’s in marriage and parenting. It’s in family and friends. It’s in sacrifice and forgiveness. It’s in dinner around the coffee table and long walks. It’s in the hands and faces of the people we see every day, in the whispers of our prayers and hymns and songs. It’s in our neighborhoods and churches, our classrooms and living rooms, on the water and in the stories we tell.And let me tell you where it’s not: it’s not in numbers—numbers in bank accounts, numbers on scales, numbers on report cards or credit scores.''

''The love you’re looking for is never something you can calculate. It’s not something you can buy or earn or hustle for.It’s something you discover in the silence, in the groundedness, in the sacred risky act of being exactly who you are—nothing more, nothing less. In that still,holy space, the love you’ve been frantically hunting for all along will bloom within your ribs. And you will know, in that moment, that it has been there all along, like a whisper, the very Spirit of God himself.''

“You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.”

“In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart. ”

“What God says is best, is best, though all the men in the world are against it.”

“Prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer.”

“He who runs from God in the morning will scarcely find Him the rest of the day.”

“This hill, though high, I covet to ascend; The difficulty will not me offend. For I perceive the way to life lies here. Come, pluck up, heart; let's neither faint nor fear. Better, though difficult, the right way to go, Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.” ― John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

“a man there was, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away the more he had.”

“When you pray, rather let your heart be without words then your words without heart. ”

“One leak will sink a ship, and one sin will destroy a sinner.”

“It is said that in some countries trees will grow, but will bear no fruit because there is no winter there.”

“Dark clouds bring waters, when the bright bring none.”

“If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us…”

“I will stay in prison till the moss grows on my eye lids rather than disobey God.”

“I have given Him my faith, and sworn my allegiance to Him; how, then, can I go back from this, and not be hanged as a traitor?”

“Pray often, for prayer is a shield to the soul, a sacrifice to God, and a scourge for Satan.”

“Conversion is not the smooth, easy-going process some men seem to think... It is wounding work, this breaking of the hearts, but without wounding there is no saving... Where there is grafting there will always be a cutting, the graft must be let in with a wound; to stick it onto the outside or to tie it on with a string would be of no use. Heart must be set to heart and back to back or there will be no sap from root to branch. And this, I say, must be done by a wound, by a cut.”

“The man that takes up religion for the world will throw away religion for the world.”

“Though there is not always grace where there is the fear of hell, yet, to be sure, there is no grace where there is no fear of God.”

“Just as Christian came up to the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, fell from off his back, and began to tumble down the hill, and so it continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre. There it fell in, and I saw it no more!”

“Nothing can hurt you except sin; nothing can grieve me except sin; nothing can defeat you except sin. Therefore, be on your guard, my Mansoul.”

“I seek a place that can never be destroyed, one that is pure, and that fadeth not away, and it is laid up in heaven, and safe there, to be given, at the time appointed, to them that seek it with all their heart. Read it so, if you will, in my book.”

“It is always hard to see the purpose in wilderness wanderings until after they are over.

“The road of denial leads to the precipice of destruction”

“It is profitable for Christians to be often calling to mind the very beginnings of grace with their souls.”