Quotes from Susan Meissner

People will always distrust what they don't understand. And what they distrust, they cannot

They aren't afraid to take risks, but they don't gamble. They are generous but not extravagant. They thrive on beauty of economics, the fact that it is both art and science.

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.

That the past is nothing you can make friends or enemies of. It just is what it is. Or was. It is this day you are living right now, this very day, that is yours to make of it what you will.

Yes. Strangely enough, war has a way of absolving us of the mistakes we make while in its dreadful shadow, but it keeps this absolution a secret. I didn't realize I was playing my cards against a cruel opponent that had its own cards to play.

When you are hungry for something, you often do not use your best judgment.

Why do people hurt other people? I murmur. Lila laughs. Because they can, sweetheart. I look at the face in the mirror, at that sad face. That can't be the reason Lila leans in. Her face is next to mine.... ...Sometimes they just can't help it, she says. They don't mean to hurt anyone. It just happens. And there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing ? Not unless you've got a magic wand, love.

understand 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.

Shut your eyes to the world of pain, and you also shut your eyes to the world of delight.

what we see is not always what is. And what is, we often cannot see until we train our eyes to see it.

hills in the distance—beyond the tiny coastal city and the boats in the water that everyone in a hurry misses—represent all that is beyond the moment in time when the angel told the Virgin she would bear the Savior of the world. That is the vanishing point. Without it, there would be no sense that this moment is a slice of time.

To her, there was only one shade to every color. This was the difference between us. She was happy with the one shade.

The heart always does what it needs to do.

They spoke in languages that bore no resemblance to anything familiar: long, ribboned sentences looped together with alphabetic sounds that had no rhyme or meter.

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.

People who say everything happens for a reason usually say that only when they agree with the reason. Those people are not the ones who wish they could fold back time and make different choices. They don't lie awake at night and whisper, If only . . .

I find that I am also shedding tears of happiness and relief that something good can still happen in this upside-down world.

And though it can be painfully difficult, it can also be unspeakably wonderful.

Dream of sweet tomorrows.

Event succeeds event; accidents, people, happenings, one after another come toward us. Each must be met and dealt with. . . . For this process of adjustment is life, and the mastery of it is the art of living. . . . —KARL DE SCHWEINITZ, The Art of Helping People out of Trouble, 1924

The hospital at Ellis was the stationary middle place where what you were and what you would be were decided.

School gave me wings to leave rural Pennsylvania for Philadelphia, and my diploma gave me wings to Manhattan.

The American Protective League, of course. We keep an eye out for German sympathizers, slackers, shows of antipatriotism. That sort of thing. It's important work.

If I had learned anything from this past year, it is that despair is love's fiercest enemy.