Quotes About Reflection

Worship often takes our attention off ourselves completely. It isn't necessary to relate our worship of God to what he has done for us. God is great and worthy of our worship regardless of what he has done for us! Yet, having blessed the name of the Lord together, it strengthens our faith to remember what God has done for us, and also to hear what God is doing in other people.

Humility means that you acknowledge you don't know everything, and you might be especially confused when it comes to God.

Deep change is rarely a matter of knowledge. It is a matter of repentance.

refractions of divine goodness are best identified, praised, and enjoyed. If their appearance is episodic and brief, and even if they are contaminated with selfishness or pride, don't let the unattractive features of someone's life blind you to the good.

If you want to know more about yourself, turn to Jesus. When

Our fatigue limited our desire to talk. Besides, each person's story did nothing except bring you closer to your own pain.

We're all carrying our coffins with us every day." Or "We are all constantly cheating death.

What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can't.

I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.

She made sadness beautiful

People say that things like this happen in slow motion, as though you suddenly become an astronaut in the antigravity chamber of your own life. This wasn't true for me. Things were speeding up instead, and I did my best to slow them down in my mind.

This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.

That night, I slept hugging my secret.

We are all bodies, but the dying body starts decaying right before our eyes. And those narratives that tell us what it's like to live, and die, inside those bodies are helpful to all of us, because no matter how old we are, our bodies never stop being mysterious to us.

No one will ever love you more than you love your pain," he had replied, his words ringing even louder in the dark. She

To teach me that a lifetime can be vast as a hundred years or sudden as a few breaths? Enjoy this one you have left. It all passes so fast. In the time it takes to draw a breath.

What if my becoming fully aware of the frequency of such moments makes me terrified to leave my house?

Each death frames previous deaths in a different light, and even deaths to come. During the time my mother was sick, I found myself crying uncontrollably over the deaths of people I barely knew.

Each death is as singular as the individual who is dying, and in the end we will get no definitive answers.

God grant us the courage to change those things we can, the serenity to accept the things we can't, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I owe Oprah and that show a tremendous debt.

We cannot write about death without writing about life. Stories that start at the end of life often take us back to the past, to the beginning - or to some beginning - to unearth what there was before, what will be missed, what will be lost.

Children are apt to forget to remember.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.