Heather King Quotes

Looking out over the water, I spotted him right away,straddling his board. He was only a dot, but I would have known him anywhere.I thought of the shape of his hands,the hollow at the base of his spine,the way my heart had never stopped skipping a beat at the sound of his voice, and I realized it was the kind of loss- because I knew now that the thing I wanted more than anything in the world not to go fully wrong could- from which I would never fully recover. And I'm not sure I ever fully have.

We're called to speak to people to whom we often don't feel like speaking; to refrain from surrounding ourselves with people "just like us," whose thoughts, ideas, and actions we can more or less manage and control; to share not just with the poor, but with the rich, the mediocre, the irritating, the Republicans, the Democrats, because we never know who the poor are. We never know whose heart is hemorrhaging. We never know who needs a kind work, a smile, a helping hand.

Like the rest of the world, they seemed to have figured out something I didn't know - where they'd come from, where they were going - and moved on.

Children laugh an average of three hundred or more times a day; adults laugh an average of five times a day. We have a lot of catching up to do.

Prayer is like practicing the piano or ballet or writing: you have to bring your body for a very long time, in spite of your body's frailties and conflicts and general revolt, and then one day your body is not separate any more. You've in a sense become the piano or the dance or the word or the prayer. The prayer is in your heart. The prayer is your heart.

Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn't drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.

I once heard a sober alcoholic say that drinking never made him happy, but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in about fifteen minutes. That was exactly it, and I couldn't understand why the happiness never came, couldn't see the flaw in my thinking, couldn't see that alcohol kept me trapped in a world of illusion, procrastination, paralysis. I lived always in the future, never in the present. Next time, next time! Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again. And all my efforts were doomed, because already drinking hadn't made me feel good in years.

If I've made any "progress" it's that now I know I'll be an alcoholic till the day I die, and that is both my biggest cross and my greatest blessing.

On the contrary, that someone as weak and

I had no idea what time I'd left, how I'd gotten home, who'd been up here, and how long he, she, or they had stayed. Another night, added to the hundreds that had gone before, shrouded in mystery. Really, when you thought about it, it was creepy. My own life was a secret to me.

Life would be vanilla ice cream without 31 flavors of individuality.

There's nothing inherently interesting about being a drunk
in fact, quite the contrary.

I didn't want to hear that people lived happily ever after. I wanted to know that other people suffered, too.

I had also pled, the whole year, to be wholly relieved of my romantic attachment; begged to stop loving so much. But I had finally been given to see that my desire was what made me human; that desire was my glory and my cross; that desire had given me a window onto the divine that would sustain me all my life. I had seen at least one person as God must us-for where did my eyes come from but God? - and that is a rare and precious gift.