Quotes About Challenges

A Twice-Born person pays attention when the soul pokes its head through the clouds of a half-lived life. Whether through choice or calamity, the Twice-Born person goes into the woods, loses the straight way, makes mistakes, suffers loss, and confronts that which needs to change within himself in order to live a more genuine and radiant life. But

Twice-Born people use the difficult changes in their outer lives to make the harder changes within.

While Once-Born people avoid or deny or bitterly accept the unpredictable changes of real life, Twice-Born people use adversity for awakening.

It's easy to remain blind about ourselves when we stay within the safety zone—among people who are just like us, in a place that looks like home. We can trick ourselves into thinking that we are far more open-minded and bighearted than we really are. It's when we must walk our talk in the complex landscape of a messy life that self-righteous ideals are whittled down into the honest truth.

All librarians, deep down, loathe their buildings. Something is always wrong—the counter is too high, the shelves too narrow, the delivery entrance too far from the offices. The hallway echoes. The light from windows bleaches books. In short, libraries are constructed by architects, not librarians.

Don't run away from your troubles, because they'll sure as hell run faster.

At that moment I felt so ruined by life that I couldn't imagine it ever getting worse, which just shows that my sense of humor was slightly more durable than my imagination.

Don't worry about it." "When you're me, there's always something to worry about. Everything goes wrong for me, and you know it.

These embedded differences were enough to wreck everything, but what eager young couple would ever believe it?

Intelligent men think up ways to get themselves in tangles a stupid man would never imagine.

Life takes many twists and turns. It bruises and burns and rips apart. But it also loves and heals and forgives.

the big problem with motherhood of girls, it seems to me, is that we're both women.

There are a million rules for being a girl. There are a million things you have to do to get through each day. High school has things that can trip you up, ruin you, people say one thing and mean another, and you have to know all the rules, you have to know what you can and can't do.

School is just like having a job. You have to show up, you have to do your work, and you have to be around tons of idiots or mean people. Now that I think about it, it's worse than having a job. At least there you get paid.

Under the idea that we can all make our own fates, that we have choices, is the reminder that sometimes we don't. That sometimes life is bigger than our plans. Bigger than us.

Try to live. Try to be happy. [...] Things end, people leave, and life goes on. You need the bad things to feel the good ones.

And I know what people say about not listening to insults or how you should let stuff roll off you, but it's not that easy.

I will always know what life can take, but I am ready to see what it can give.

Under the idea that we can all make our fates, that we have choices, is the reminder that sometimes we don't. That sometimes life is bigger than our plans. Bigger than us.

Single women making their way to individual destinies-- who in the home circle understands them? If they try to share what they have found in their further reach, who wants it?

To be asked to relive this horribly painful part of our lives and then be questioned on whether we could have or should have done more than we did to help ourselves is, frankly put, insulting. The truth of the matter is, the person being questioned survived. So that in and of itself is a big deal.

I didn't understand most of what he was saying. I should have had to understand what he was saying. I was still so young. And I certainly should not have had to learn it this way!

Life is a journey for us all. We all face trials. We all have ups and downs. All of us are human. But we are also the masters of our fate. We are the ones who decide how we are going to react to life.

We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don't know it, that's all. But we do the best we can. Most of us are just trying to get through.