Quotes About Journey

Usually with life, you start wherever you are, and you flail around for a while--

What seems true is that something in life, on the highways or in our hearts, is always being installed, or being repaired, or being torn down for the next installation.

The pain does grow less acute, but the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to.

Life is not a submarine.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace--only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. I can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or in tiny tastes, like a deer at the salt.

It can be too sad here. We so often lose our way.

One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.

Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what his painting isn't, until finally he finds out what it is.

ultimately we're all just walking each other home.

writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

And if minor characters show an inclination to become major characters … you at least give them a shot at it, because … just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done more to point you to where your true homeland lies than your priest or your best friend or even your psychiatrist.

Every one of us sometimes needs a tour guide to remind us how big and deep life is meant to be.

publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn't quite where you were heading. The light you see when people are in the tunnel of deep trouble is domestic flashes of recognition and kitchen comforts, not Blake's radiance, which would be my preference.

the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to.

We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

Grace means suddenly you're in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you to get there on your own.

We think we're humans having spiritual experiences, but we're really spirits having human experiences

We contain all the ages we have ever been.

writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here - and, by extension, what we're supposed to be writing.

The search for meaning will fill you with a sense of meaning. Otherwise

We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky.