Quotes from Susan Meissner

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 take.

I can't imagine God keeping mothers from their children in that beautiful place

Think of England as a very large book. The Cotswolds would be an unfussy chapter in the middle somewhere where there is lots of limestone and even more sheep.

I smiled at this because some days I feel as though I've already lived several lifetimes and others as though I haven't lived any kind of life at all, that I'm still waiting for it to start. Or waiting for it to start over.

He's more than just the baby she found all those years ago. He's the proof that out of a great pile of ashes you can still find something that the fire didn't take.

Which was worse? Mourning the loss of something without knowing you never actually had it, or mourning the loss of what you thought you had and never had at all?

Death doesn't ever look at shoulda, though, does it? Death looks at nothing. It just does what it's meant to do.

We are, all of us, living out the stories of our lives. Each of our stories will end, in time, but meanwhile, we fill the pages of our existence with all the love we can, for as long as we can. This is how we make a life.

have learned this is her way of coming to terms with events she cannot control. We all have to find a way to do that, don't we?

Thistle House is for people who love and care for one another. We respect one another in this house, Emmeline. We carry one another's burdens. We weep for one another and we laugh with one another. We hold one another by the hand when the lights go out and when the way seems hopeless. We work together and we share the table together and we pray together. No matter how old we are or what we are called.

I've often wished I could turn back time and do things differently, but maybe it's better to start anew than to go back in time and hope you have the courage and wisdom to make different choices.

Evie] says the flu wanted to make barbarians of us, to have us think life is not precious and the dead are not worthy of our kindest care. Our humanity is what made what happened to us so terrible.

we are all on the road that leads to the edge of our mortality. Life is too brief to waste a minute of it chasing after things that don't matter.

When people are thrown into an abyss and together find their way out of it, they are not the same people. They are bound to one

There were a thousand words for dreams realized and only one common whimper for hopes interrupted.

Fear is not only a leaden foe, but a liar as well. It was not as bad as I thought it would be, sitting there in a London department store on an ordinary Saturday.

stop and consider that there is always, always the other road to choose, even if it seems to be nothing more than an unpaved path in the middle of nowhere? On

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

And even as I'm telling her what I have done with my life, I realize that I have in fact learned what I am good at, what she told me so very long ago I needed to figure out. I am good at loving people, I have always been good at loving people, and I don't suppose there's any skill better than that. Surely that is what God intended all along for me.

Love, in its own way, had been creating a home for all of us as we searched for that place where we belonged. Love was home.

I want to learn how to look deep to see what people are really like. I want to be the kind of person who plunges past the surface and seeks to know the inner thoughts of the people I am around.

It's funny how just having an unobstructed view of the possible future can make you think you're capable of achieving anything.

We only see a little bit of our stories at a time, and the hard parts remind us too harshly that we're fragile and flawed. But it isn't all hard. Your story isn't all hard parts. Some of it is incredibly beautiful.

The main reason I have come here is to shuffle Death back to the place where it belong. That won't happen if I don't get to tangle with it.