The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Anna White

The first night in the hospital with a snuffling baby girl, I learned that my family was not the only thing that had expanded. There was now a whole new world of opportunities for judgment and self-doubt.

fear, memoir, new-baby, parenting, parenting-children, self-doubt

My husband says this longing for isolation is not a good quality, that if I wanted to be a hermit I should have moved to the West Coast and adopted a lot of cats, not gotten married and had children that demand to be fed several times a day.

family, humor-relationships, introvert, introvertedness, isolation, love, parenting, withdrawal

All of my secrets and scars and wishes and dreams can live together in this one body without shame, without blame, and without fear. I am all loved, all accepted, and all in service to God. In his eyes, regardless of what I did or didn’t do today, I am loved. I am His, so I am enough.

christianity, dreams, enough, failures, faith, god, grace, love, loved, memoir, religion, scars, shame

A basic reality of life is that we all struggle. We hurt and have hurt other people. We all feel lost sometimes. This isn’t all we are, but it is a part of who we are. The only question I have when I’m with someone is, “Can they admit it? And will they let me admit it too?

christianity, faith, grace, honesty, hurt, journey, life, lost, memoir, pain, relationships, religion, sisterhood, struggle

I love that there’s no cutoff where we get labeled and sent off to a home for hopeless, cranky, depressives. Every day is a new chance to listen longer and be braver and love more. We get to try again and again and again.

brave, change, christianity, despression, faith, grace, hopeless, humor-quote, inspirational-quote, life-quote, love, memoir, new-chance, new-day, persevere, try-again

I doubt that anyone has a Damascus moment after experiencing discrimination. Most people seem to have shining moments of change after experiencing grace.

change, christianity, discrimination, faith, grace, memoir, religion

Being broken isn’t the worst thing. We can be mended and put together again. We don’t have to be ashamed of our past. We can embrace the history that gives us value, and see our cracks as beautiful.

brokenness, christian-living, healing, inspirational, memoir, mended, recovery, repair, uplifting, wholeness

Acts of love, for me, are leaps of bravery.

bravery, leap, love, love-quote, memoir, personal-growth, relationship-quotes, risk

I think this is the essence of life: to be willing circle back, to fall in deeper, to relearn what I thought I already knew.

faith, learning-process, life-quote, memoir-writing, personal-growth

I believe in beauty. I believe in goodness. I believe in the power of turning: the other cheek, time, curve of the earth.

beauty, change, inspirational-quotes, memoir, personal-growth, seasons, time, turning

I want to share my story, and I want to know yours. I believe with all my heart that sharing our stories, the real, ugly, broken ones, is one of the most powerful things in the world, because to share our story we must first accept it. We must own it. We must stop running from it or shoving it into the corner when company comes over. To share our story is to admit that we’ve been changed.

acceptance, brokenness, change, faith, grace, healing, inspirational, memoir, personal-growth, recovery, story

The idea of practicing love is deeply appealing to me, because built right in is an acceptance of imperfection. There is an acknowledgment to myself that I am going to mess this up, an understanding that there is room to grow. Each of my failures just affirms the truth that we are all starting over and rising again.

don-t-give-up, failure, imperfection, life, love-quote, memoir, personal-growth, practicing, rising-again, trying-again