Quotes from Susan Meissner

Dissecting a book was the same as making sense of life. You have to find a way to interpret life, or you'll go nuts.

We moved wordlessly from one room to another, from the room of the dead to the room where time lay in pages everywhere I looked.

I don't know very many people who can piece together eloquent prayers when their souls are wounded. Words don't come at those times, but tears do. I have always thought of my tears as prayers.

When we trust someone, we believe what they tell us is true. We experience it as being true. It's not the experience itself that empowers us to believe it. It is the trust.

Fear is worse than pain, I think. Pain is centralized, identifiable, and wanes as you wait. Fear is a heaviness you can't wriggle out from under. You must simply find the will to stand with it and start walking. Fear does not start to fade until you take the step that you think you can't.

The person who completes your life is not so much the person who shares all the years of your existence, but rather the person who made your life worth living, no matter how long or short a time you were given to spend with them.

When you only do what is expected of you, you never learn what you would've done had you chosen for yourself.

Truth is a strange companion. It devastates one moment and enthralls the next. But it never deceives. And because of that, in the end, it comforts.

I used to think mercy meant showing kindness to someone who didn't deserve it, as if only the recipient defined the act. The girl in between has learned that mercy is defined by its giver. Our flaws are obvious, yet we are loved and able to love, if we choose, because there is that bit of the divine still smoldering in us.

Home isn't a safe place where everything stays the same; it's a place where you are safe and loved despite nothing staying the same.

Please don't let the unhappiness you knew in the past keep you from accepting happiness now.

what I hope readers will take away, is that a happy life is not made up of what you have dreamed of, chased after, and achieved, but rather whom you poured your life into, who poured their life into yours, and the difference you've made in the lives of others. Most of the dreams we pursue don't have intrinsic worth, but people always do.

I don't know very many people who can piece together eloquent prayers when their souls are wounded. Words don't come at those times, but tears do. I have always thought of my tears as prayers.

Everything beautiful has a story it wants to tell.

To love is not to be fragile; it is to be unlocked and open. And when something is open, other things can come in.

Do not choose to abandon love because you are afraid that it will crush you. Love is the only true constant in a fragile world.

There is just the simple truth that you must forgive yourself for only being able to make your own choices, and no one else's.

Change always happens... We adjust to it. Somehow we figure out a way. We straighten what we can or learn how to like something a little crooked. That's how it is. Something breaks, you fix it as best you can. There's always a way to make something better, even if it means sweeping up the broken pieces and starting all over. That's how we keep moving, keep breathing, keep opening our eyes every morning, even when the only thing we know for sure is that we're still alive.

Oh, but it's our tears that make us human, Isabel.

I don't think love is something you can start and stop by choosing. Our hearts tell us who we will love, and not the other way.

It was only after time had passed that a person was able to see whether she might have been able to bear the load she was sure had been too heavy.

I hope [Willa] still thinks butterflies are beautiful. I think they are. We shouldn't think for a moment that just because their lives are short they shouldn't be here.

It should always make us happy to say that loving someone and being loved by someone is worth whatever price paid.

I am saying, when you make a choice, even if it's a bad one, you've played your hand. You cannot live your life as though you still held all your cards.