Quotes from Susan Meissner

People who say everything happens for a reason usually say that only when they agree with the reason.

And what does war even accomplish? How does one country win over another by simply killing its people? None of it makes any sense.

People treat you differently when they think you are too young to know what you want.

Sometimes what you want is given to you in a way that is so very different from how you had pictured getting it

But heaven seems a place where truth cannot hurt. Here, the truth can be devastating.

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.

We belong far less to where we've come from than where we want to go. —FRANZ WERFEL

Everyone has a past, and everyone's past matters.

then surely there is an adversary. There is something opposed to you. Something that desires to defeat you. You want to believe your enemy is the disease. You don't want to believe even for a minute that the enemy is your own body, this weak tent of flesh that cannot stand up against a speck of contagion, this fragile weave of muscle, bone, and soul that also cannot resist the power of flame nor the pull of the ground

Papa said marriage is not kept by affection but by a pledge. Affection does not beget the pledge; the pledge begets the affection. When you share a life and a home and a bed with someone, you become soul mates as surely as cream and effort produce butter....And so I began to imagine my life with James Luddy. I imagined being butter.

For a moment, there was no age difference between the two of them, no crossed purposes, no opposing forces. They were just two women trying to chisel a happy life out of giant hulk of rough-edged circumstances.

Poetry speaks slowly. My mother told me that. We are usually too much in a hurry.

We decide who and what we will love and who and what we will hate. We decide what we will do with the love and hate. Every day we decide. It was this that revealed who we were, not the color of our flesh or the shape of our eyes or the language we spoke.

It is much harder to pretend than it is to simply be who you already are.

Love (they say) sometimes flies, sometimes walks, runs with one, creeps with another, warms a third, burns a fourth, wounding some, and slaying others. In one moment it begins, performs and concludes its career; lays siege in the morning to a fortress which is surrendered before night, there being no fortress that can withstand its power." —Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

It's that sacred place where your soul is at rest because all the people you love most are there.

I no longer fear Death, though I know that I should. I'm strangely at peace with what I used to think of as my enemy. Living seems more the taskmaster of the two, doesn't it? Life is wonderful and beautiful but oh, how hard it can be. Dying, by contrast, is easy and simple, almost gentle. But who can I tell such a thing to? No one. I am troubled by how remarkable this feeling is.

With all great loves there is first a great struggle

It's as if the body is a candle and the soul is its flame. When the flame is snuffed out, all that is left to prove that there had been a flame is the candle

even that we only have for a little while. Even the candle is not ours to keep. And yet how we care for that candle for that stretch of time that it is still ours! How we want to remember the shape and fragrance of the little

sometimes in a blink, and sometimes so slowly you can't even see it happening.

Terrible things can happen to you that leave you unable to risk trusting the world with what you love; I know this better than anyone.

You don't realize how small your world is when you are a child. Your parents are your east and west, your sun and moon.

In that moment I began to see that there are times when there is no best choice. There is only this choice and that choice, and both are terrible.