Quotes from Sallie Tisdale

What I don't think they realize is that when they pray for a healing, death is a healing... It's not the healing that you might want, but as sure as we're born, we're going to die. And we're healed from the troubles of this world.

forgot that I would get old and lose the power that seemed entirely part of me, the power that allowed me to be busy and productive, rear three children, write books in the evening, and still get up and go to work.

The anger and shame of these women I hold in one hand, and the basin in the other. The distance between the two, the length I pace and try to measure, is the size of an abortion.

Everything I write is sinful, full of lies, especially the big one, the one you go to hell for: pretending not to be a fool.

Poor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: so misunderstood. She is widely credited with identifying the five stages of grief. She didn't. Kübler-Ross worked with dying people, not grieving people. She identified clear phases people go through when they are dying not as stages but as emotional experiences that come and go and may overlap.

and the strange, undeniable fact that the presence of death can be joyful.

is biology destiny? And the answer is yes, sometimes it is. Women who have the fewest choices of all exercise their right to abortion the most.

True self-determination—as refugees and prisoners show us every day—is the freedom to hold one's own ideas, to live, however confined, in a spacious mind.

Write for yourself and yourself alone. Don't try to please anyone else, and don't be afraid of anyone.

Then she took up her practice, not to prove her worth or to be seen, not in dignity or fear, but as though she were giving her whole life away as a gift to the world with every step.

Life, he wrote, "is a dangerous situation." It is the frailty of life that makes it precious;

This is not a meritocracy.

You don't know what your voice sounds like until you speak.

To write the essay is to be haunted by our own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what we've missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see.

Larry Hjort, an AIDS activist, gave counsel to people who were overwhelmed with the needs of their dying friends. "Everyone is perfectly adequate," he said. "There are just some impossible situations.

They are afraid to read out loud, fearful of being thought stupid or foolish or — what? I ask them. Girlish? Boring, says one Megan. (Which Megan? I can't remember.) This is a terrible fear, I know — this fear of not being interesting — of being trivial, not special. It is almost as great, I think, as their fear of standing out and being special.

Even the ways we don't eat are based in class. The middle class don't eat in support groups. The poor can't afford not to eat at all. The rich hire someone to not eat with them in private.

Even buddhas are subject to the conditions in which they appear, and enlightenment is not a fixed state that we can hold on to. It must be renewed, rediscovered, as we ourselves are renewed and rediscovered.

But why would we mistake an abundance of information for peace of mind?

When I thought about death in those years, I didn't quite believe in it.

Acceptance is found only by wholly inhabiting our denial. Contemplating death is really contemplating resistance, and for a long time. How do we get ready to die? We start with not being ready. We start with the fact that we are afraid. A long, lonesome examination of our fear. We start by admitting that we are all future corpses pretending we don't know.

In India, horns function as turn signals, brake lights, hand gestures, prayers.

He thought film functioned the way fascism does, inserting itself into a culture so quietly that one barely has time to notice that everything has changed.

It is our peculiar punishment that we know things change and we want this to be otherwise.