Love And Loss Quotes

Forgetting: that, too, was the heart's slow way of healing, but it could only be done alone. Love and loss turns us into the most solitary of creatures, their mysteries can never entirely be shared. ~ Eric Gamalinda

Here you are.
Still standing. Fierce with the reality of love and loss. Wearing the truth of our hearts on your tattered sleeves. And yes, this one very nearly took you out. And yes, there were days when the darkness was heavy and the climb out of that rabbit hole required you to mine your depths for strength you didn't even know you had.

But here you are.
Broken open by hope. Cracked wide by loss. Full of longing and grief and the burn of that phoenix fire. Warrior painted with ashes. Embers from the blaze still clinging to your newborn skin, leaving you forever marked with scars of rebirth.

And just look at you. Heart broken but still beating. Arms empty but still open. Face raised to the sky and giving thanks for the light, even when it hurts your eyes.

My god, you are beautiful. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

Happiness is a frightening state of being. If we let ourselves be happy, then there is something that can always be taken from us. In one minute, one second, everything can change. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

When we find the courage to face our pain, it always helps heal others, as well as ourselves". ~ Phyllis Edgerly Ring

What I wanted to preserve was the turbulent gasp in his voice which lingered with me for days afterward and told me that, if I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest. (p. 109) ~ Andre Aciman

Love and loss come in equal measure. ~ Kate Lord Brown

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me
a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for. ~ Andre Aciman

In the balance of love and loss, it was love that made me struggle to ... Breathe. ~ Rebecca Donovan

Gregori brought Savannah's hand to the warmth of his mouth,his breath heating the pulse beating in her wrist. The night is especially beautiful, mon petit amour.Your hero saved the girl, walks among humans, and converses with a fool.That alone should bring a smile to your face.Do not weep for what we cannot change.We will make certain that this human with us comes to no harm.
Are you my hero,then? There were tears in her voice, in her mind, like an iridescent prism. She needed him, his comfort,his support under her terrible weight of guilt and love and loss.
Always,for all eternity, he answered instantly,without hesitation, his eyes hot mercury. He tipped her chin up so that she met the brilliance of his silver gaze.Always, mon amour.His molten gaze trapped her blue one and held her enthralled. Your heart grows lighter.The burden of your sorrow becomes my own. He held her gaze captive for a few moments to ensure that she was free of the heaviness crushing her.
Savannah blinked and moved a little away from him, wondering what she had been thinking of.What had they been talking about?
"Gary." Gregori drawled the name slowly and sat back in his chair,totally relaxed. He looked like a sprawling tiger,dangerous and untamed. "Tell us about yourself."
"I work a lot.I'm not married. I'm really not much of a people person. I'm basically a nerd."
Gregori shifted, a subtle movement of muscles suggesting great power. "I am not familiar with this term."
Christine Feehan

Love and loss so intricately entwined. You cannot have one without the other, unfortunately. ~ Helen Scheuerer

All these tears shed in the world, where do they go? If one could capture all of them, they could water the parched. Then perhaps these tears would have value and all this grief would have some meaning. Otherwise, it was all a waste, just an endless cycle of birth and death; of love and loss. ~ Thrity Umrigar

If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! (p. 225) ~ Andre Aciman

I learned a lot from the stories my uncle, aunts and grandparents told me: that no one is perfect but most people are good; that people can't be judged by their worst or weakest moments; that harsh judgements can make hypocrites of us all; that a lot of life is just showing up and hanging on; that laughter is often the best, and sometimes the only response to pain.

Perhaps most important, I learned that everyone has a story – of dreams and nightmares, hope and heartache, love and loss, courage and fear, sacrifice and selfishness. All my life I've been interested in other people's stories. I wanted to know them, understand them, feel them. When I grew up into politics, I always felt the main point of my work was to people a chance to have better stories. - Page 15, Paragraph 5, 'My Life' by Bill Clinton. –Hard cover version- ~ Bill Clinton

You know, when you've loved deeply and lost deeply, it's okay to feel deeply. ~ Lindsay Harrel

The waves, the girl in the rain, and that awful, blood-begotten stom. Blood and love and loss. ~ Terri Farley

I've never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I've only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up. ~ Taylor Swift

It's better to experience love and loss than to never have at all. ~ Katherine Bogle

I'll never let go of you again," she whispered. "I swear it. ~ Dianna Hardy

It is impossible to say why we love something or someone. We can come up with reasons if we have to, but the important part happens in the dark, beyond our control. We just know when it is there. And when it goes away. ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

I feel like I have lost myself. I want to find the "Me" that went away with you. The part of me that loved so unceasingly without condition. The part of me that loved the way you taught me how to love. The part of me that felt more real than I ever felt before. No one seems to find that "Me" and I can't find Me either. ~ Kate McGahan

If you love someone and they vanish, you are left nodding like a zombie and throwing teacups at a wall. ~ Corey Ann Haydu

Semrad taught us that most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people "acknowledge, experience, and bear" the reality of life - with all its pleasures and heartbreak. "The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves," he'd say, urging us to be honest with ourselves about every facet of our experience. He often said that people can never get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel. I ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

He wore the memory of her embrace like armor, and though he knew it would not save his life, it would be all that was left to him to ease his passage into whatever lay beyond. ~ Andrew Levkoff

It's his words that slay me. His sometimes sweet, sometimes sad, always sexy words about love and loss seem to bypass my brain and speak straight to my soul. ~ Leisa Rayven

I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss. ~ Junot Diaz

When it comes to love and loss, acceptance is never easy. We can't make someone see all we have to give, make them love us, or make them change. All we can do is move on and stop wasting time. ~ April Mae Monterrosa

I couldn't understand how boldness and sorrow, how you're so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable, hesitant, and eager to confide so many uncertainties about herself could, with one and the same gesture, reach into my pants with unabashed recklessness and hold on to my cock and squeeze it. ~ Andre Aciman

A song that straight people related to, now they find out it's about two guys? The flip side, or what I now know to be the upside, was that I had a large audience who might not have known about my homosexuality, were very attached to the work, and could now see that love and loss and hope are universal emotions that can't be owned, controlled, or denied by law or religion. ~ Bob Mould

Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long. ~ Andre Aciman

Love is love, and loss is loss. We all love, and we all die, and everyone suffers the pain of grieving. The trick is to enjoy what you have while you have it. ~ Lynsay Sands

I'll tell you what I miss.
I miss that throbbing heart telling me to take a leap when the sky looks too dark.
I miss the walk that I took in the narrow cobblestoned pathways that fumed of history and undying stories of love and loss.
I miss the coffee that scented like mist in a frozen dream in a land of strange beauty.
I miss the afternoon tea that followed my pen to hours of happy melancholy.
I miss the muse I saw dance in a foreign land of near heart.
I miss the stranger smiling at me from a corner and teaching me his language to smile at my twinkled happiness.
I miss that symphony of mad evenings ending in a sky full of stars to fill my soul with an unknown ecstasy.
I miss that hand of an old woman trying to tell me her story.
I miss that child running up to me in a crowd of unknown faces to hand me her candy.
I miss that night where I lay back on a distant balcony gazing at the solitary moon for hours knowing that it is shining at my homeland just as bright.
I miss that stranger listening to my heart and telling me how beautiful it is.
I miss a wandering soul, who went on filling her breath with life of eternal love in the wings of Life.
And I'll tell you now when I look back I see how wonderful Time has treated me and how grateful I am to have lived in moments that roar of a beautiful Life lived with a heart throbbing to take a leap once again in that ocean of Life's beguiling journey. ~ Debatrayee Banerjee

Silence is a practice of emptying, of letting go. It is a process of hollowing ourselves out so we can open to what is emerging. Our work is to make ourselves receptive. The organ of receiving is the human heart, and it is here that we feel the deep ache of loss, the bittersweet reminders of all that we loved, the piercing artifacts of betrayal, and the sheer truth of impermanence. Love and loss, as we know so well, forever entwined. ~ Francis Weller

It's about love and loss, it struck me as a meaningful and compelling story, and the shifts in reality offered up strong visual possibilities. ~ Michael Almereyda

If I love one lover,...I have loved many more. ~ Edna Stewart

THE NAME OF THE WIND has everything fantasy readers like, magic and mysteries and ancient evil, but it's also humorous and terrifying and completely believable. As with all the very best books in our field, it's not the fantasy trappings (wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things, about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss. ~ Tad Williams

Overall the theme is about never giving in ... not letting anyone tell you what to do or take anything away from you. Always being yourself, whatever that may be. The content obviously takes a darker and romantic approach to relationships about love and loss, as well as overcoming adversity in everyday life. Generally, just being tough and standing up for what you believe. ~ Ashley Purdy

Because some things in life just hurt so much that you need to feel physical pain to start to heal from it. ~ Kristen Hope Mazzola

And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts. ~ Andre Aciman

You can never lose me. Someday you will see that I was with you all along. You will find out that what you have loved you can never lose. ~ Kate McGahan

This is another awful truth of losing people you love: everyone needs something different. And the needs almost never match up. ~ Corey Ann Haydu

As long as you loved somebody, each kiss was hope and wonder, but it was also the potential for good-bye. ~ Martina Boone

Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart. ~ Trent Zelazny

Sleep comes, no matter how deep the sadness cuts. It's like a gift from the universe. ~ Corey Ann Haydu

And when all was done and all was said, we sat silently staring at the moon's reflection on the rippling river, soaking it all in. The differences between people, cultures and times.
The monsters. The myths.
The heroes.
The victims.
The love and loss.
Loss and love. ~ Alys Arden

He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears. ~ Cassandra Clare

I don't need a man to be happy. I had a great one , that was good enough. I don't expect to find another one like him, and why settle for anything less? I'm going ot be perfectly content alone.
Marya ~ Danielle Steel

Sometimes a tragedy must happen to keep a soul on schedule. This is the reason for things that seem to have no reason. This is the reason that we cannot fathom when we are going through it.
Perhaps I will get very sick. People wonder why cancer exists when it is just a clever method to teach people lessons about love and loss. It borrows time or steals it depending on the needs of Heaven. It is a vehicle to get us where we need to be. It calls us home because something needs us there. ~ Kate McGahan

This was another item about growing up: you encountered all the cliches of love and loss and heartbreak. ~ Sylvia Brownrigg

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction. ~ Tahereh Mafi

In the uneven balance of life, I'd experienced love and loss. The loss challenged me to be strong, but it was the love that supported me when I was weak. I was a survivor. ~ Rebecca Donovan

Everyone gets one last line. But first lines, stories of love and loss and hope floating on backs of paper cranes? We choose how many of those we get to tell. ~ Kate Bassett

the reverse side of love is unbearable loss. ~ Susan Abulhawa

We're nothing if we're not loved. When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really. And I think we are all striving for it in different ways. I also believe very, very strongly that everybody is the hero/heroine of his/her own life. I try to make my characters kind of ordinary, somebody that anybody could be. Because we've all had loves, perhaps love and loss, people can relate to my characters ~ Maeve Binchy

Live a life abundant in love and rich in spirit, these are the seeds of a fulfilling existence. Be the safe harbor you seek in the world. Follow your dreams, not your fear.
Go into the New Year with an open mind and hopeful heart. Don't let the chains of unforgiveness weigh you down. Life is too short to live in a prison of past hurts. The futures is yours for the taking and creating.
Life is bittersweet, when we can let darkness and light co-exist as illumination, we can live in true happiness. When we live life at its best, it is a symphony of feelings, of high and low notes, of tragedy and comedy, love and loss, magic and the sublime. It can be quite a spectacular journey when we fully embrace and accept it. ~ Jaeda DeWalt

Yes, we will get hurt. Our hearts will break, and if we are lucky they will break open. When they do, we can begin to experience ourselves, relationships - indeed all of life - in a deeper, richer, and more meaningful way. ~ Randy Siegel

The mountain trees that grew between the pines were a brilliant blaze of fall colors, like fire against the emerald green of the pines, firs and pruces. And it was, as I'd told myself long ago, the year's last passionate love affair before it grew old and died from the frosty bite of winter. ~ V.C. Andrews

Our wounds can so easily turn us into people we don't want to be, and we hardly see it happening.

Protect your heart, love yourself, and be with people who love and care for you. ~ Sue Fitzmaurice

Give Me Strength This is my prayer to thee, my lord
strike, strike at the root of penury in my heart. Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows. Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service. Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before insolent might. Give me the strength to raise my mind high above daily trifles. And give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will with love. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

I just never had a friend who cared as you do. My best friend Destiny doesn't understand me, she has a husband and a child. A life I have always wanted, but unfortunately, tables have turned to where I can't find that one guy I could love."
Angel felt bad for feeling lust for the straight woman. She should have known better.
"Jana, men have no idea what they are missing. You are as beautiful as they come and I would appreciate you more than any man would. ~ Amber M. Kestner

In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free. ~ Oscar Wilde

Hope finds its fulfillment when nurtured through faith and shared with love. ~ Mollie Marti

I love 'Batman.' I love the Adam West 'Batman.' I love the animated 'Batman.' The character of Batman can encompass any interpretation, which is what makes that character so brilliant and why it's survived so many different media. ~ Grant Morrison

When mind knows, we call it knowledge. When heart knows, we call it love. And when being knows, we call it meditation. ~ Rajneesh

Love much like piece of mind and sanity are things you never truly appreciate until there gone. ~ Kaneda Chaplin

To be able to enjoy fully the many good things the world has to offer, we must be detached from them. To be detached does not mean to be indifferent or uninterested. It means to be non-possessive. Life is a gift to be grateful for and not a property to cling to.
A non-possessive life is a free life. But such freedom is only possible when we have a deep sense of belonging. To whom then do we belong? We belong to God, and the God to whom we belong has sent us into the world to proclaim in his Name that all of creation is created in and by love and calls us to gratitude and joy. That is what the 'detached' life is all about. It is a life in which we are free to offer praise and thanksgiving. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

He: I want you to write a love story
She: About?
He: About a boy for whom a girl wasn't his soulmate, but she was his soul- the one who kept him alive.
She: And what should I call it?
He: Just name it our love story ~ Namrata

Align your feelings and endeavors with the highest vibration in the universe - love - and success will always be yours. ~ Donna Labermeier

Truth is my favorite science, virtue is my favorite art, faith is my favorite technology, and love is my favorite religion. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.
I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.
The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The falling is complete. It's here. It's happened, and now I'm in love with the woman in my arms.
But this woman needs me to be the kind of man who doesn't fall so easily. ~ Lauren Blakely

I ordered a cheeseburger and a beer from a waitress who looked as though she wanted to be in one of those want-to-get-away? commercials. She called me hon. I love when a waitress calls me hon. ~ Harlan Coben

I'm interested in female friendships and family relationships. So I don't write the traditional romance, where you just have the hero and the heroine's love story. I like intertwining relationships. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

By nature, I think I am a pretty private person, and that is what is hard even doing interviews for films that I really love doing, because in some ways, it diminishes the experience that I had. ~ Steve Buscemi

I couldn't possibly love you any more than I already do. Josephine, my heart resides with you forevermore." He remembers the quote on the back of my mother's watch. The same quote my father said to my mother. My heart squeezes painfully and I swear I could die of contentment. ~ J.L. Mac

I tell ya! The road to success is an endless battle for you and me. ~ Steven Jackson

When it comes to pain, love, joy, loneliness, and fear, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. ~ Ingrid Newkirk

I started cooking for the love of cooking, and I am going to keep cooking whether there's a celebrity aspect to it or not. ~ Marcus Samuelsson

Our deepest need as human beings absolutely centers around our need for genuine love and meaningful connection. Jobs we can quit, houses we can sell, cities we can move away from, but it is our most intimate relationships that penetrate our hearts, our souls, and our minds like nothing else in this world. ~ Shannon Tanner

She's a beautiful work of art created by the hands of God . ~ Imran Shaikh

Get drunk, Austin, have a love affair. It would be a tragedy to die and discover that you hadn't completely used up your body. ~ Jane Urquhart

Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brother, before I could begin to act, I must leave him his freedom to be Christ's; I must meet him only as the person that he already is in Christ's eyes. This is the meaning of the proposition that we can meet others only through the meditation of Christ. Human love constructs its own image of the person, of what he is and what he should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which he has received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all men. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I was born into
A religion of Light,
But with so many other
Religions and
Philosophies,
How do I know which
ONE
Is right?

Is it not
My birthright
To seek out the light?
To find Truth
After surveying all the proof,
Am I supposed
To love
Or fight?
And why do all those who
Try to guide me,
Always start by dividing
And multiplying me –
From what they consider
Wrong or right?
I thought,
There were no walls
For whoever beams truth and light.
And how can one speak on Light's behalf,
lf all they do
Is act black,
But talk WHITE?


BLACK AND WHITE by Suzy Kassem ~ Suzy Kassem

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you-
Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar! ~ T. S. Eliot

Arms and legs thrashing. The hammer of blood.
I'm coming, says Jude.
And holds her breath. Orgasm is brief, nonviolent.
What color? I say
Devastating blue, she says. The pale blue eyes of a murdered boy.
Very nice.
You remembered, she says.
Jude comes in colors. How could I forget. Trembling blond orgasms that seem to piss her off and rare pink orgasms that never end. Chemical red orgasms that fill her with guilt and perfect orgasms black as fresh earth. Orgasms shadowy and gray that may or may not cause her to weep and orgasms the color of bruised skin, orgasms that fade from purple to yellow and remain visible for days. ~ Will Christopher Baer

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations". ~ May Sarton

These include the need to express one's gifts and do meaningful work, the need to love and be loved, the need to be truly seen and heard, and to see and hear other people, the need for connection to nature, the need to play, explore, and have adventures, the need for emotional intimacy, the need to serve something larger than oneself, and the need sometimes to do absolutely nothing and just be. ~ Charles Eisenstein

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea -
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me? ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

I was good. I was at home with baseball. But I set my routines, and I need them. I can't ... I can't play without them."

He didn't say anything else until we got to home plate and stepped on it at the same time. He put his hands on my face and looked at me directly, as if putting a tunnel of attention between us. His thumbs rested on my cheeks.

Why hadn't I seen it the night before? Or an hour ago? Why didn't I put it all together from the exhibition games and the spring training video? He was coming apart at the seams.

"You," he said. "You threw it all in the fire. Things started collapsing right before you, and when you came, everything went to hell. It's you. I denied it, because if I let you in, I had to start over. I tried to bend it around to not want you. But I can't deny it anymore. There's no center without you. ~ C.D. Reiss

I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year, Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, If you entreat me with your loveliest lie I will protest you with my favorite vow. I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And vows were not so brittle as they are, But so it is, and nature has contrived To struggle on without a break thus far,
Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were. ~ Larry Ellison

The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today.

That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.)

Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species. ~ Daniel Goleman

To be a good cook you have to have a love of the good, a love of hard work, and a love of creating. ~ Julia Child

I love telling stories; I always have, and I think women need to be more proactive about telling their own stories and sharing their points of view. ~ Dylan Penn

Love, the emotion that should elicit healing, was in fact the most painful emotion of them all. It crept in when you didn't want it. Made itself at home, terrorizing your hormones with confusion. It made you more susceptible to pain, it weakened your resolve while simultaneously making you frantic with need. And it hurt. Not just mentally, but physically. ~ Whitney Barbetti

In his book Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, Jon Pahl argues that the consumer aspect of American Christianity is a kind of a feel-good cop-out of deeper truths. But for those who have been hurt by the church, who have been told their bodies are unacceptable in the eyes of God, or have witnessed other's pain perpetuated by religion, it is nothing of the sort. It's actually freedom. And it's freedom that has been sought and found by religious outsiders for millennia. The saints we revere like Joan of Arc and St. Francis of Assisi, were difficult nomadic outsiders who created their own religious spaces when none could be found for them. Even the model of Jesus, walking smelly and dirty in the desert with his band of fishermen, all men, was a rogue, cast out by the religious authorities. But these thoughts can be cold comfort when you are the one deemed unacceptable, deemed sinful by the very community that by its very precepts ought to love you. ~ Lyz Lenz

When you love someone, you fight. You fight for them, and you fight with them. She needed me to fight for her then, and I'll continue to do that until she can fight for herself again. ~ Harper Sloan

I wish him episodes of glorious, sun-washed tedium and a loss of innocence he will contemplate for the rest of his life. ~ Julie Schumacher

I love zombie films like Danny Boyle's '28 Days Later' - I thought it was so brilliantly done and so grounded in reality. I was definitely thrust into the zombie world watching that film. ~ Teresa Palmer

Were it not for the transformative love of Jesus Christ, I would have been raised by a single mom without my father in the household, this is our fight, and that is why I'm running for president. ~ Ted Cruz

Thanks to a lifetime of brainwashing by Disney and Lifetime and Hallmark, she naively believes glimpsing God during an epic fuck somehow translates into some kind of happily ever after with her Prince Charming. ~ Lauren Rowe