Quotes About Reflection

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names.

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.

The more I wonder, the more I love.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

Storytelling itself is an activity, not an object. Stories are the closest we can come to shared experience….Like all stories, they are most fundamentally a chance to ride around inside another head and be reminded that being who we are and where we are, and doing what we're doing, is not the only possibility. —Harriet McBryde Johnson, Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life (2006)

I don't understand it," I continued. "These things, they just keep happening, and I know it has to mean something. It has to. I want my suffering to mean something. I want this pain to matter.

In these early anonymous seasons, God graciously grants us the opportunity to wrestle with our appetites before other lives are at stake, to struggle with our passions privately before moral collapse affects the innocent publicly.

From John's perspective, the true value of people seeing him was that people would then be positioned to see through him and gaze at Jesus. By

key invitation of our spiritual journeys is to be emotionally honest about our uncertainties. Questions such as the one asked by John are signs of a living, growing, active faith, not evidence of a dying one.

more of a sojourn. A sojourn is a "temporary stay at a place."4 And a "stay" is about presence, not productivity.

Brother Lawrence, known for his intimacy with God, wrote, "The foundation of spiritual life, for me, has been a high image of God and a high esteem of God."2

I feel that trials do not prepare us for what's to come as much as they reveal what we've done with our lives up to this point.

If I want to be alone, some place I can write, I can read, I can pray, I can cry, I can do whatever I want - I go to the bathroom.

We don't draw loved ones into our lives coincidentally. They're there to shine a light on our unfinished emotional business, to reveal to us our deepest tendencies. And as my life is proving to me even now, those patterns appear time and again, often cleverly disguised. And they'll keep right on showing up until we're willing to truly look at them.

For as long as I am alive, I will be growing and improving, wielding my pen as the author of my own forever. But even as I lift my life to the next level, I hope to always recognize my reflection. I want to know who I am and accept every part of that identity. I am frightened and I am fearless. I am weak and a warrior. I am uncertain and I am confident. And by learning to embrace the paradox in all of it, I am more myself.

There's also the multicultural side of me, the biracial ancestry that allows me to connect with a wide spectrum of people. And then there's my spirit, that blend of glass-half-full optimism, introverted reflection, and outward-facing social activism.

That though passageway came with a surprising revelation. When life forces you to face yourself, what awaits in the mirror is a gift: vulnerability. Your heart is pierced. You're broken open. You're hyper-aware of what you're feeling.

I now see so clearly what escaped me then: It's not that the ground underneath me was suddenly shifting; it's that it is never still. That's part of the work of my journey—getting comfortable with life's groundlessness.

An aha moment is not a happy ending—it's an open doorway, one you have to choose to walk through.

Sometimes you just have to do whats best for yourself.