Quotes About Patience

Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we're going to do for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.

Bird by bird buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

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. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we'd pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

Talking to the parents of older kids was helpful for me, since the parents of kids the same age as yours won't admit how horrible their children are. ... you can either practice being right or practice being kind. Screaming in the car helped. [p. 94]

Imagining God can be so different from wishful thinking, if your spiritual experiences change your behavior over time. Have you become more generous, which is the ultimate healing? Or more patient, which is a close second? Did your world become bigger and juicier and more tender? Have you become ever so slightly kinder to yourself? This is how you tell.

This is how we make important changes-- barely, poorly, slowly.

How are we going to get through this craziness?' I asked. There was silence for a moment. 'Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe,' he said.

Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer—the phone rings or the mail comes, and light gets in through the cracks, so you can see the next right thing to do. That's all you need.

Additionally, I have spent approximately 1,736 hours of this one precious life waiting for the man to finish and pretending that felt good. And I want a refund.

How are we going to get through this craziness?" I asked. There was silence for a moment. "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said.

it may just be that you are developing a quiet doggedness. This is priceless. Perfectionism, on the other hand, will only drive you mad.

Believing isn't the hard part; waiting on God is. So I stuck with it and prayed impatiently for patience, and to stop feeling disgusted by myself, and to believe for a few moments that God, just a bit busy with other suffering in the world, actually cared about one menopausal white woman on a binge.

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.

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. So

I had to grip myself by the wrist not to pitch one good idea after another at them. . . . I writhed with the effort to stay silent. . . . Since Jax's birth my ideas about what would be best for everyone usually got in the way. Life is already an obstacle course, and when you're adding your own impediments (thinking they're helping), you really crazy it up. You make it harder to even just cross the room. You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer.

got dropped off at the airport in a better mood than I had arrived in. In the third third of life, you may become just as miserable and prickly as ever, but you cycle through more quickly. You remember other dark nights of the soul and how by dawn they always broke. You discover that everything helps you learn who you are, and that this is why we are here. You roll your eyes at yourself more gently. You sigh and go make yourself a cup of tea.

They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You'll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.

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

do you still believe that I am the Resurrection and the Life? Even when you don't get what you want? Even when nothing makes sense?

If you're lost in the forest, let the horse find the way home.

if you've worked in good faith for a couple of hours but cannot hear it today, have some lunch.

Try to remember that to some extent, you're just the typist. A good typist listens.