Quotes from Susan Meissner

The picture of her on that sofa with Kat sitting next to her on a blanket with Sarah in her lap is a beautiful image I know I will always remember.

tired people don't give up. Tired people just take a rest. Rest a bit and try again.

Sometimes it's not about right and wrong but now and later. Right now, we are having to put up with a difficult situation that we don't deserve, and it's not right.

We were both shattered. We were broken people who longed to be whole. We thought it was love that was driving us to do what we did. But it wasn't love. It was fear. We were both too afraid of ending up unwanted and unneeded.

That's what we did, didn't we, Audrey? We learned to be brave when it was easier to be afraid.

The risk in giving love and receiving love is better than the safety of not loving at all.

love and fear can sometimes feel the same, but each will lead a person to take different actions. When a decision h as to be made, fear usually motivates me to choose what is best for me, whereas love motivates me to choose what is best for another person. Fear urges me to hang on, white knuckled, to what is mine, while love can actually lead me to let go.... when you hold something you love tightly to your chest for fear of losing it, you actually risk crushing it against you.

After what I had been through, I needed something far steadier than love.

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.

The sun is dissolving like an enchantment

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 day will end jubilant. Jubilant.

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.

I knew I would need a place to make sense of what I had lost and yet never had.

Supper is stew and dumplings and apple brown betty for dessert, and, oh, how wonderful the simple meal tastes.

I had known for less than a day that I understood nothing, really, about love, only that it was the most devastating, most spectacular, most desirable force on earth.

with courage and resolve and the refusal to allow those without voices to remain unheard.

Poetry speaks slowly. My mother told me that. We are usually too much in a hurry." He sighed at this remembrance. "Hurried people miss many things. They see only what is right on top. . . ." His voice fell away.

we choose our actions at the moment when we must

still have my colors. Surely a new kind of happiness is still within reach.

There is a calming aura at the ocean's edge, despite the frothing foam, crashing waves and roaring white noise. The ocean looks the same on your good days and your bad days. Nice to know on the worse of days that there are few things you can utterly count on. P. 107

I don't see how you can live in a black and white world without becoming…uncreative. You can't make anything new. Everything already is what it is.

The 1927 Supreme Court ruling that allowed Carrie Buck to be forcibly sterilized gave every state the green light to continue or begin sterilizing those deemed unfit to produce children, all in the name of "race betterment.

Everything in my life suddenly shifted into focus. It was like time froze and I was given a dazzling moment to comprehend the difference between that moment and the one before it. No one made choices for me. I made them. If I took no risks in the choices I'd made, it was because I didn't have the courage to take them or didn't want to live with the consequences. I didn't want to risk disappointment myself. It had been safer to defer than to strike our on my own.