Quotes from Karen White

But I think sometimes a person has to be forced underwater to see if they're going to drown or swim.

A life without rain is like the sun without shade.

Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim....Be patient and strong; someday this pain will be useful to you.

There are no completely good or bad people. Everybody makes mistakes, or bad choices. It's how we live with them that make us the people we are.

Courage isn't about the absence of fear. Courage is doing the one thing you think you cannot do.

Great tragedy gives us opportunities for great kindness.

You ain't dead yet, so you ain't done.

Sometimes I guess you need to lose everything before you realize what's really important.

You will never be truly happy if you keep holding on to the things that make you sad.

Life isn't perfect. It's not supposed to be. We all make mistakes. You bash your head against the wall and you get hurt, but you walk away and make the best of it. And that's what makes it life, Brenna, not perfection. You'll never find happiness if you only expect to find a perfect life. Happiness is something we reach for while we try to learn from our disappointments.

Being a mother is like being a gardener of souls. You tend your children, make sure the light always touches them; you nourish them. You sow your seeds, and reap what you sow.

You have to get through the rain if you're ever going to see a rainbow.

The word that came to me now was "defiant." Because a person had to be defiant to be able to stand amid the wreckage of her life and instead of shaking a fist, pick up a hammer.

Death and loss, they plague you. So do memories. Like the Mississippi's incessant slap against the levees, they creep up with deceptive sweetness before grabbing your heart and pulling it under.

Sometimes we make decisions because it seems to be the only path visible at the moment. It's only later that we see there was more than one path, but the others were blocked from our vision at the time. That's the thing with hindsight, you see. Even if you can see it clearly, there's no going back. It's at that point we need to turn around and stare ahead and make a new life.

It's not only ghosts who haunt us. Our memories follow us through life, surprising us now and again when we are forced to turn around and look behind us.

Strong winds buffet the sea oats and tall dune grasses, tossing sand and seabirds where it will, winding my sister's golden hair into sunlit spirals of silk until it becomes the only good memory I have of her -- the only memory I allowed myself to keep.

Time is a funny thing. It can take some people a whole lifetime before they realize they've been playing tug-of-war all by themselves.

When everything you're about to see is too much, look up and see that the sky is clear and know that everything is going to be all right.

Mama?" "Yes, Emmy." She traced a rivulet of rain with her finger as it made its journey down the glass. "How do you know when it's been long enough?" Emmy could sense her mother smiling into the phone. "When you relaize that love doesn't have a time span. Only pain does. I think sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two, so we just hold on to both of them like they're inseparable.

I think that her life was about finding the extraordinary in every day. It was how she could sit in her garden on a rainy day and see the beauty in it. It's what got her out of bed every morning.

A great man once wrote, "Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire." If only I were as eloquent as Mr. de la Rochefoucauld...I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. And I want you. And I need your kiss. And your touch on my skin like a man needs water. Always.

I've found that you can't measure happiness the way you measure yards in a race. You just learn to recognize it when it arrives so you can enjoy it while it lasts.

She thought of the horse with his scars and wondered if having them so visible wasn't preferable to the hidden kind where nobody knew how to avoid the parts that still hurt.