Quotes from Heather King

Life would be vanilla ice cream without 31 flavors of individuality.

I had no idea what time I'd left, how I'd gotten home, who'd been up here, and how long he, she, or they had stayed. Another night, added to the hundreds that had gone before, shrouded in mystery. Really, when you thought about it, it was creepy. My own life was a secret to me.

Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn't drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.

There's nothing inherently interesting about being a drunk -- in fact, quite the contrary.

Children laugh an average of three hundred or more times a day; adults laugh an average of five times a day. We have a lot of catching up to do.

We're called to speak to people to whom we often don't feel like speaking; to refrain from surrounding ourselves with people "just like us," whose thoughts, ideas, and actions we can more or less manage and control; to share not just with the poor, but with the rich, the mediocre, the irritating, the Republicans, the Democrats, because we never know who the poor are. We never know whose heart is hemorrhaging. We never know who needs a kind work, a smile, a helping hand.

The irony of instant gratification is that it leaves such lasting scars.

I didn't want to hear that people lived happily ever after. I wanted to know that other people suffered, too.

We can discover that of the rough material we've been given, every single thread of what we'll eventually contribute back to the tapestry of all humanity is every bit as important, needed, wanted, and cherished as every and any other scrap and thread.

Looking out over the water, I spotted him right away,straddling his board. He was only a dot, but I would have known him anywhere.I thought of the shape of his hands,the hollow at the base of his spine,the way my heart had never stopped skipping a beat at the sound of his voice, and I realized it was the kind of loss- because I knew now that the thing I wanted more than anything in the world not to go fully wrong could- from which I would never fully recover. And I'm not sure I ever fully have.

My heart was beating so hard that for a second I thought I might pass out. It was like revisiting the hole where you'd once been held in solitary confinement: a force field of muscle-memory-stored pain and toxic energy so palpable I was afraid that if I stayed any longer it might suck me back in.

one of my biggest illusions was that other people were meant to assuage my anxiety by filling some lack that I was responsible for filling myself. If I wanted to give, the giving had to be "for fun and for free." The giving couldn't be out of guilt, nor because I secretly wanted to get something back, nor because I wanted the other person to respond in such a way as to satisfy my longing to be useful. Thérèse

Anyone to whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Even back then I understood the real purpose of literature. I didn't want to hear that people lived happily ever after. I wanted to know that other people suffered, too.

The Jesus Prayer Having had my fill of listening, without acquiring any understanding of how to pray unceasingly, I gave up on such sermons that were geared to the general public. I then resolved, with the help of God, to seek an experienced and knowledgeable guide who would explain unceasing prayer to me, for I now found myself so irresistibly drawn to learning about it.38 —Anonymous, The Way of a Pilgrim

Like the rest of the world, they seemed to have figured out something I didn't know - where they'd come from, where they were going - and moved on.

If I've made any "progress" it's that now I know I'll be an alcoholic till the day I die, and that is both my biggest cross and my greatest blessing.

the opposite of holding on is participating in something larger than ourselves.

On the contrary, that someone as weak and

I had also pled, the whole year, to be wholly relieved of my romantic attachment; begged to stop loving so much. But I had finally been given to see that my desire was what made me human; that desire was my glory and my cross; that desire had given me a window onto the divine that would sustain me all my life. I had seen at least one person as God must us-for where did my eyes come from but God? - and that is a rare and precious gift.

The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help. That is, only for one who feels infinite anguish.

over the horizon.

Prayer is like practicing the piano or ballet or writing: you have to bring your body for a very long time, in spite of your body's frailties and conflicts and general revolt, and then one day your body is not separate any more. You've in a sense become the piano or the dance or the word or the prayer. The prayer is in your heart. The prayer is your heart.