#gem

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#child #childhood #encouragement #memoir #memories

When you see people only as personalities, rather than souls with life missions to fulfill, you forever limit the growth and possibilities of what God has in store for another person. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#judgement #vision #life

Connecting with those you know love, like and appreciate you restores the spirit and give you energy to keep moving forward in this life. ↗

— Deborah Day

#connections #encouragement #life #love #restoration

When we stop judging others and ourselves, our heart begins to open. ↗

— Swami Dhyan Giten

#heart #joy #judgement #love #meditation

One thing I have learned is that the people who label you are usually the ones who know the least about who you really are and they have never made the effort to learn different. ↗

— J.S. Goldstine

#label #life #people #quote #life

BELIEVE in yourself even if nobody else does! ↗

— Stephanie Lahart

#encouragement #love-yourself #self-motivation #life

My life has become a dismal sigh fettered by pangs of grief and anguished weeping. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#discouragement #giving-up #grief #hopelessness #resignation

Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly--I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea. ↗

— George MacDonald

#inspiration #inspirational

Life, she realized, so often became a determined, relentless avoidance of pain-of one's own, of other people's. But sometimes pain had to be acknowledged and even touched so that one could move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it. ↗

— Mary Balogh

#avoid #pain #touc #life

If you commit to giving more time than you have to spend, you will constantly be running from time debt collectors. ↗

— Elizabeth Grace Saunders

#commitments #debt #peace #productivity #time-debt