Joanna Brooks Quotes & Sayings

No one says: when my family treated me as a stranger, I preferred the company of strangers, and I walked among strangers and what did I find but God in every one of their faces. — Joanna Brooks

I said "it is my first language, my mother tongue, my family, my people, my home; it is my heart, my heart, my heart." No one says any of these things. But they should. — Joanna Brooks

I am not the same kind of Mormon girl I was when I was seven, eight, or eighteen years old. I am not an orthodox Mormon woman like my mother. I am an unorthodox Mormon woman with a fierce and hungry faith. — Joanna Brooks

Courage doesn't mean being free from fear; it means learning to work through fear and speak even when we are afraid. — Joanna Brooks

Who watches over us when we leave? Who remembers our names when disappear ourselves from home? Who hears the absence of our voices? Who misses the sound of our stories? — Joanna Brooks

How badly I wanted to belong as I had when I was a young Mormon girl, to be simply a working part in the great Mormon plan of salvation, a smiling exemplar of our sparkling difference. But instead I found myself a headstrong Mormon woman staking out her spiritual survival at a difficult point in Mormon history. — Joanna Brooks

This is a church of tenderness and arrogance, of sparkling differences and human failings. There is no unmixing the two. — Joanna Brooks

Religion is about responsibility to a community and a tradition ... — Joanna Brooks

How is it we come through the most difficult miles? Do we come silent or singing? Do we come in company, or do we come alone? Are we all alone on the open plains under starlit skies, all alone with the cooing owls in the dark of early morning? Our ancestors, our grandmothers, will their spirits take pity on us? — Joanna Brooks

What do we do with ourselves when we find we have failed to become the adults we dreamed as pious children? — Joanna Brooks

I can't go on like this, I told myself. And You can't possibly want me to feel this way, I demanded of God. God didn't argue. Forced to choose between my nostalgia for the faith of my childhood and my dignity as an adult, I put down the doll and drove away. — Joanna Brooks

No one says: I broke rules, I broke rules, I broke rules - I broke all the rules. That one. And that one. And that one too. Yes, I did. — Joanna Brooks

You see that? That big messy spiral of people, moving, trying to find God? I ask them, as the exodus unfolds once again on screen.
That right there is Zion. Get there however you can. — Joanna Brooks