Quotes from Susan Meissner

It is the nature of the earth to shift. It is the nature of fragile things to break. It is the nature of fire to burn.

Ah, but what is history? Is it a record of what happened or rather our interpretation of what happened?" "I think it's both," I answer. "It has to be both. What good is remembering an event if you don't remember how it made you feel. How it impacted others. How it made them feel. You would learn nothing and neither would anyone else.

Love was both the softest edge and the sharpest edge of what made life real.

there are no secrets to a charmed life. 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.

I smiled. I just wish... I wish I didn't judge people by what they have or don't have. I wish I could see people for you they are on the inside before I come to any conclusions. My dad blinked slowly and then said... Yes, that would be better than the other, but it still makes you their judge.

You think you have a view of what's waiting for you just up the road, but then something happens, and you find out pretty quick you were looking at the wrong road.

Sages of the past would say we are—all of us—just imperfect people on a flawed planet who are trying to hold on to what is good and lovely and right.

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 understand what we want to understand.

If people don't do their part to stop the spread of evil when they're asked to, it just gets stronger and then no one can stop it.

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.

Which one of them would make you the most sad if you had to live your life without him?

You shouldn't imagine things that you haven't a shred of proof happened...

I think literature reveals more about us than history does.

We do not become different people as we age; we just add layers of experience onto who we already are.

We are born knowing how to be just. And we die knowing we spent a lifetime pretending we didn't.

Kindness is always motivated by something nobler than just a desire to be kind.

but if I know anything about time, it is that it stretches to walk with you when you grieve. The rest of the world may zoom past at breakneck speed, but when you are learning to live with loss, time slows to the pace of your breathing.

My choices that terrible morning had been prompted by love. What others had chosen had been prompted by hate. The effects of our choices had spilled onto each other. They always did.

It is the nature of the earth to shift. It is the nature of fragile things to break. It is the nature of fire to burn. And just as it is the nature of men and women to build, it is also in our nature to begin again after disaster. This I know, too.

I understood nothing really about love, only that it was the most devastating, most spectacular, most desirable force on earth. Love was both the softest edge and the sharpest edge of what made life real.

You want to fix what hurts the moment it starts hurting, but this time you're going to have to embrace the slowness of healing. You'll never be able to live with this part of your story until you realize you must make peace with what happened to you and your part in it. And that takes time.

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.

He could not know that thoughts are not things you can give or not give. Thoughts are thrust upon you. You can only hope that thoughts that you don't want will tire of you at some point and flutter away.