When you find a redemptive explanation for your suffering, you move from victim to wounded healer.

~ Donald Miller

“The past is our definition. we may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” --Wendell Berry

"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us."

~ Albert Schweitzer

"If you can forgive the person you were, accept the person you are, and believe in the person you will become, you are headed for joy. So celebrate your life!" 

~Barbara Johnson

"In the end, everything will be OK.  If it's not OK, it's not the end."

(unknown)

quotation tattoo

"The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."

~Oscar Wilde

A Woman of No Importance, 1893

spoken by the character Lord Illingworth

"If the God who revealed life to us, and whose only desire is to bring us to life, loved us so much that he wanted to experience with us total absurdity of death, then-yes, then there must be hope; then there must be something more than death; there must be a promise that is not fulfilled in our short existence in this world; then leaving behind the ones you love, the flowers and the trees, the mountains and the oceans, the beauty of art and music, and all the exuberant gifts of life cannot be just the destruction and cruel end of all things; then indeed we have to wait for the third day."

~ Henri Nouwen - A Letter of Consolation