Quotes & Sayings About Moments In Our Lives

The people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. — Christina Baker Kline

I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure. — Ben Lerner

When the sky is as grey as this - impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour - and the stooped millions lift their heads, it's hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes. — Martin Amis

Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler. — Douglas Coupland

There are moments in our lives when we summon the courage to make choices that go against reason, against common sense and the wise counsel of people we trust. But we lean forward nonetheless because, despite all risks and rational argument, we believe that the path we are choosing is the right and best thing to do. We refuse to be bystanders, even if we do not know exactly where our actions will lead.
This is the kind of passionate conviction that sparks romances, wins battles, and drives people to pursue dreams others wouldn't dare. Belief in ourselves and in what is right catapults us over hurdles, and our lives unfold.
"Life is a sum of all your choices," wrote Albert Camus. Large or small, our actions forge our futures and hopefully inspire others along the way. — Howard Schultz

It's in our own lives, every single day, whether we recognize it as funny at the moment or not. — Sean Astin

Mom always liked to say that we hardly ever know the decisions we make that change our lives, mostly because they are little ones. You took this bus instead of that one and ended up meeting your soul mate, that kind of thing. But there was no doubt in my mind that this was one of those life-changing moments. — Rachel Hawkins

In marriage we have a duty to God, our spuses, the world, and future generations. But we are sinners. A husband and wife need to acknowledge that when the Bible speaks of fools, it is not just speaking about other people, but about them as well. Even the wisest among us has moments of folly. So God gives us spouses to serve as wise friends by praying with and for us, attending church with us, speaking truth, and providing Scripture along with good books and online classes, lectures, and sermons to nourish fruitfulness in our lives. — Mark Driscoll

There are moments when tribulations occur in our lives, and we cannot avoid them. But they are there for some reason. — Paulo Coelho

Our journey begins in Part One with new discoveries about the brain's emotional architecture that offer an explanation of those most baffling moments in our lives when feeling overwhelms all rationality. Understanding the interplay of brain structures that rule our moments of rage and fear - or passion and joy - reveals — Daniel Goleman

I think we all have those moments at one point or other in our lives ... when we see someone and immediately imagine a whole universe around them. A relationship, a future, and all based on just a second which might not even have been in their company. It's amazing how quickly the human mind can come up with this stuff. — Danny Wallace

Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts? ... Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts ... They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind."
"Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles."
"The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin. — Christina Baker Kline

Ordinary points of bravery, the synchronistic moments we all engage in, and the transformative power of minding our voices, forgiving, trusting, and learning to love ourselves and our lives, while we wait. — Andrea T. Goeglein

The most powerful moments of our lives happen when we string together the small flickers of light created by courage, compassion, and connection and see them shine in the darkness of our struggles. — Brene Brown

Moments come and go; quick flickers in time. Yet those moments can have the profoundest impact on our lives. Either we seize them, and wield them to our needs, or we let them go. It's the moments we let go that, I believe, remain with us strongest - because regret is something that never leaves us. — B.N. Toler

Whether we are at Cafe Gratitude or Carl's Jr, whether we are in a cathedral or in a nightclub, whether we are inside of a mosque or on the metro, every single moment is a sacred moment. A moment far too important for us to miss.

When we miss the people and the experiences and the feelings of our lives, we miss God. We don't get to know the joy of seeing God show up in the world. More profoundly, we don't get to participate in the wonder of God showing up in the world. — Stephen Lovegrove

All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them. — Erma Bombeck

Rarely if ever, moments come that are so defining in our lives. The years are glutted with benign matters which impact us more deeply than we could have ever imagined in our youth. — Joel T. McGrath

But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play
I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. Browning writes about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us. There are moments when the odour of lilas blanc passes suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest month of my life over again. — Oscar Wilde

The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves, and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure. — Alice McDermott

When we experience moments of ecstasy-in play, in art, in sex-they come not as an exception, an accident, but as a taste of what life is meant to be ... Ecstasy is an idea, a goal, but it can be the expectation of every day. Those times when we're grounded in our body, pure in our heart, clear in our mind, rooted in our soul, and suffused with the energy, the spirit of life, are our birthright. It's really not that hard to stop and luxuriate in the joy and wonder of being. Children do it all the time. It's a natural human gift that should be at the heart of our lives. — Gabrielle Roth

Love finds us at different times, different moments in our lives. For some people, it happens gradually and grows over time. For others, it clamps down on their souls and won't let go. It's a unique feeling that won't leave your heart. There's no reason for it. She's in your life; you can't do or think of anything else, but her. You want to spend every moment in her company, even if it's only to gaze upon her face and be close to her. You're that for me, Lilly. — Loni Flowers

In every siutation , there is a FINE LINE between what is right and what is not so right.THAT is the MOMENT when one has to stop and look which way to go!! These MAGICAL MOMENTS determine the DIRECTION of our lives ! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

There is always a moment in the pyramid of our lives when the apex is reached. — Ninon De L'Enclos

Saying that "life is short" is such a cliche. And it's true.
In fact, we only have five minutes to be here. In the really big scheme of things, not even that long. We humans don't even have the lifespan of fruit flies if you look at the bigger picture.
In other words, we don't have a second - not even a second - to waste on petty drama, on living fake, shallow lives, on swallowing our truth, or on hiding our light.
We only dance around the flame of this gorgeous human existence for moments and the one thing important at all is loving beautifully. — Jacob Nordby

The greatest moments in life are the miraculous moments when human impotence and divine omnipotence intersect - and they intersect when we draw a circle around the impossible situations in our lives and invite God to intervene. — Mark Batterson

Life is a constellation, the individual moments in our lives seem so pointless sometimes; but when you look at the whole picture, you can see that those little moments formed memories. — Alex Rogers

I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images. I have a suspicion that on our hard drive, our series within our brains, [exist] still photographs of very important moments in our lives ... That we think in terms of still images and that what the photography is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened. — Jon Snow

At such moments, I felt that we were like the people in California who live in enormous houses on the sides of cliffs, ghat our lives were beautiful but precarious, their foundations vulnerable. — Curtis Sittenfeld

There are moments in our lives that define the people we will become in the future, like a symptom before an ailment, or the catalyst before the cure. — Brian Joyce

I'm a practicing Zen Buddhist and I'm influenced by my readings in that tradition, such as the notion that everyone is born a perfect being and we spend most of our lives with a clouded vision trying to realize our perfection, he says. At critical moments in the book, T.S. registers his inkling of this realization. When he makes his maps, it feels like taking down dictation from the universe. — Reif Larsen

The past sucks and the future can be outright paralyzing, but we must push through those times and find what little happy moments there are in our short, short lives - Emilio — Emilio

That's why travel is so important, among other reasons: to get far enough away from our everyday lives to see those lives with new clarity. When you're literally on the other side of the world, when you're under the silent sea, watching a bright, silent world of fish and coral, when you're staring up at a sky so bright and dense with stars it makes you gasp, it's in those moments that you begin to see the fullness of your life, the possibility that still prevails, that always prevails. — Shauna Niequist

Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death.
... Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?
Maybe that's what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying. — Muriel Barbery

Relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness ... Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? — Pema Chodron

If I dismiss the ordinary - waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life ... To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories - to know that we are doing what we're supposed to be doing - is the deepest form of permission in our creative lives. The British author and psychologist Adam Phillips has noted, 'When we are inspired, rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.' This is the feeling I think we all yearn for, a kind of hyperreal dream state. We read Emily Dickinson. We watch the dancers. We research a little known piece of history obsessively. We fall in love. We don't know why, and yet these moments form the source from which all our words will spring. — Dani Shapiro

God is the Great Engineer, creating circumstances to bring about moments in our lives of divine importance, leading us to divine appointments — Oswald Chambers

Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease. — Margaret Heffernan

We all have those moments where we realize how easily our lives could be so different, for better or for worse. I met my husband at a gym in NYC! What if I'd joined a different gym? What if I hadn't worked out in the afternoons? These questions are endless. — Allison Winn Scotch

The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are moments when we touch one another — Jack Kornfield

Henri Nouwen wrote of the spiritual work of gratitude: To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives - the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections - that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Let's not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.2 — Brennan Manning

We build our lives in moments, and even the ones we can't remember become the story of who we are. — Katherine Center

All the bravery that lines our lives, in the ordinary moments adds up to an extraordinary, successful life. — Andrea T. Goeglein

Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness ... But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

The great events in our lives are physical. Childbirth. Sex. Combat. Death.
Not poetry, or music, or the thoughts of great men will flash across the transom of our minds at the moment of dying. We will remember only the moments when we felt the fibers of our body sing. Bloodily. Messily. Ecstatically. — Natasha Mostert

It's what we're all trying to do, right? Remember a time that was better. Re-create a moment of that memory as we let the crisp Coke bubble down our throats. Riding bikes on a summer day. Sitting on the curb and watching the streetlights come on. Playing in the sprinklers with a group of neighbor kids. We're all trying to salvage a time when we dreamed beyond our reality and thought monsters were under our beds instead of peppering our family trees. We're trying to harness those fleeting moments that turned our ordinary lives into something extraordinary. In the sepia haze of those memories, we are beautiful. — Liza Palmer

Reading, writing, listening to music, skipping rope, flying kites, taking long walks along the sea, hiking in the crisp mountain air, all serve a joint purpose: these self-initiated acts free us from the drudgery of life. These forms of physical and mental exercises release the mind to roam uninhibited, such collaborative types of mind and body actions take people away from their physical pains and emotional grievances. A reprieve from the crippling grind of sameness allows personal imagination to soar. Imagination, a form of dreaming, is inherently pleasant and restorative. It is within these moments of personal introspection stolen from the industry of surviving that humankind touches upon the absolute truth of life: that there must be something more to living then merely getting by; the fundamental human condition thirsts for a way to improve upon the vestment that shelters our self-absorbed lives. — Kilroy J. Oldster

We are all the sum of a million moments in our lives. — Carla H. Krueger

Never in our silent moments of illusion do we sense the dark parallel that lives next to us. Nor do we suspect the carrier. — Kris Courtney

Learn to love better.
This should be our goal in the world: learn to love.
Life offers us thousands of opportunities for learning. Every man and every woman, in every day of our lives, always has a good opportunity to surrender to Love. Life is not a long vacation, but a constant learning process.
And the most important lesson is learning to love.
Loving better and better ...
But one thing will be forever marked on the soul of the universe: my Love. All in spite of my mistakes, my decisions that caused others to suffer, and the moments when I thought it didn't exist. — Paulo Coelho

This duality has been reflected in classical as well as modern literature as reason versus passion, or mind versus intuition. The split between the conscious mind and the unconscious. There are moments in each of our lives when our verbal-intellect suggests one course, and our hearts, or intuition, another. — Robert E. Ornstein

As the tragic writer rids us of what is petty and ignoble in our nature, so also the humorist rids us of what is cautious, calculating, and priggish
about half of our social conscience, indeed. Both of them permit us, in blessed moments of revelation, to soar above the common level of our lives. — Robertson Davies

If we could capture feelings like we capture pictures, none of us would ever leave our rooms. It would be so tempting to inhabit the good moments over and over again. But I don't want to be the kind of person who lives backwardly, who memorializes moments before she's finished living in them. So I plant my feet here on this hillside beside a boy who is undoing me, and I kiss him back like I mean it. And, God help me, with the sky wrapped around us in every direction, I do mean it. — Emery Lord

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished. — Sally Mann

If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life. — Adyashanti

They can keep men in here, under lock and key, deep in the dungeon until the final moments of their lives, so that men like York and me will never taste the rain. But they cannot keep us from passing our condensation on to the sky. They cannot keep us from raining down in China. — Rene Denfeld

Live life in moments, not in days or years or your schedules. It's our misconception - most of the time - that we live our lives the way we want. Every single step that we take is influenced by others. Only the part that we hide from everyone else and keep deep within our heart, is our own. I strongly urge you all to realize that hidden part of yours. Go, live that part. Live your life. Don't let your dreams die within you. Trust me, your struggle, your fight, will be worth the risk in opening yourself up. Get up. Inhale the air of passion. Start your journey. Grab your dreams. Enjoy your mistakes. Dance to the rhythm of your heartbeats. Smile. Laugh. Love. Live.' Author — Savi Sharma

Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it's not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us. — James Lee Burke

In our lives, we come to moments of great significance that we fail to recognize, the meaning of which sometimes does not occur to us for many years. Each of us has his agenda and focuses on it, and therefore we are often blind to what is before our eyes. — Dean Koontz

I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world. — Tennessee Williams

I don't believe the idea of Fate is that everything in our lives is predetermined. For me, it's those moments when, on reflection, Life seems to have intervened and given us a friendly or not-so-friendly nudge in another direction. — Thea Euryphaessa

It terrifies me, the fragility of these moments in our lives. — William Boyd

The way we get to live forever is through memories stored in the hearts and souls of those whose lives we touch. That's our soul print. It's our comfort, our emotional nourishment at the end of the day and the end of a life. How wonderful that they are called up at will and savored randomly. It seems to me we should spend our lives in a conscious state of creating these meaningful moments that live on. Memories matter. — Leeza Gibbons

But we cannot choose what we remember and what we forget. All the lovely bright moments of our lives get forgotten except for remnants here and there, like the leaves blown from a tree in the autumn, and the terrible things, they stick with us forever, as bright and raw as the day they happened. — Paul Kearney

Our lives are not just measured in minutes. They are measured in moments - moments when the minutes stand still. — Mark Batterson

In the Mongol perspective, challenges choose us, but we choose how to respond. Destiny brings the opportunities and the misfortunes, and the merit of our lives derives from those unplanned moments. — Jack Weatherford

Each of us has experienced moments in our lives when we are fully alive - when we have no wish for it to be different, better, or more. We have no disappointment, no comparison with ideals, no sense that it is not what we worked for. We feel no protective or defensive urge - have no desire to hold on, to store up, to save. Such moments are perfect in themselves. — Laurel Scheaf

I think I give far more space and play to avant-garde writing than any other contemporary textbook author. I want students to be able to decide for themselves which aesthetics are closest to their own. Still, while I try not to be a nostalgist myself, I suppose I am drawn to those poignant moments in our lives, rendered clearly and artfully. — David Starkey

I think we've all been misled, at moments in our lives, certainly in school situations, and things like that, with getting with the wrong group briefly, or falling in with someone who we learn the truth about and no longer want to really be with. — John Hawkes

When the most important times are occurring, we don't even recognize them or notice. We are just busy living our lives. Only looking back do we know what was a great moment in our lives. — Federico Fellini

There are moments where we don't understand the world we live in - where we don't understand our own lives, our sadness or our joy. — Lisa Lucas

Is it true that we can count the moments in which something really happens in our lives? Do we notice it right away, or only in hindsight? — Jan-Philipp Sendker

Our lives, as short as they may be, are a test. And one of the biggest tests we can endure is how we respond to those moments when we don't feel the presence of God in our lives. I believe deeply that one of God's greatest gifts is to teach us there is a purpose behind every single one of our trials or problems.
Treat them as a gift, an opportunity to move forward and draw closer to God. Problems often times compel us to look to God and count on him, rather than ourselves. — Matt Patterson

In moments of spiritual crisis we naturally fall back upon what worked for us, or seemed to work, heretofore. Sometimes this shows up through the reassertion of our old values in belligerent, testy ways. Regression of any kind is just such a return to old presumptions, often after they have been shown to be insufficient for the complexity of larger questions. The virtue of the old presumptions is that they once worked, or seemed to work, and therein lies if not certainty, then nostalgia for a previous, presumptive security. In our private lives, we frequently fall back upon our old roles. — James Hollis

What about free will? . . . There's that too. I never understood why people think they're mutually exclusive. Ask me, our entire lives aren't planned out for us- just some things. Specific events along the way, crossroads we're meant to come to. Tests, maybe, to measure our progress. But we always have choices, and those choices can send us along an unplanned path . . . there are some things that are meant to happen at a certain moment and in a certain way. No matter which path you choose, which decisions you make along your own particular journey, those pivotal moments appear to be set in stone. Maybe they represent the specific lessons we're meant to learn . . . Things we have to face. Things we have to learn. Responsibilities we have to fulfill. And mistakes we have to correct. — Kay Hooper

Meaning is often found embedded in the silent moments of our lives when we can hear and see what matters most, the things audible and visible only to the spirit. — Toni Sorenson

At every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we differ with other people, but in what we agree with them. — John Ruskin

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality. It wakes us up to the fact that our lives unfold only in moments. If we are not fully present for many of those moments, we may not only miss what is most valuable in our lives but also fail to realize the richness and the depth of our possibilities for growth and transformation. — David Michie

Where does a story truly begin? In life, there are seldom clear-cut beginnings, those moments when we can, in looking back, say that everything started. Yet there are moments when fate intersects with our daily lives, setting in motion a sequence of events whose outcome we could never have foreseen. — Nicholas Sparks

Because we love the Lord, we should be spiritually sensitive to moments when the powerful and important truths of the gospel can be shared with others. Perhaps more importantly, however, we should seek at all times to purify ourselves and to lead such worthy lives that the Light of Christ emanates from us in all that we say and do. Our day-to-day lives should stand as immutable witness of our faith in Christ. — M. Russell Ballard

Well, in a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization - against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we're at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call freedom. — Michael Pollan

Perhaps we do not yet know what the word "to love" means. There are within us lives in which we love unconsciously. To love thus means more than to have pity, to make inner sacrifices, to be anxious to help and give happiness; it is a thing that lies a thousand fathoms deeper, where our softest, swiftest, strongest words cannot reach it. At moments we might believe it to be a recollection, furtive but excessively keen, of great primitive unity. There is in this love a force that nothing can resist. — Maurice Maeterlinck

Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles. Vivian — Christina Baker Kline

Child, the good Lord got plans for all of us that we don't know-and he always got His reasons. He want us to learn and rejoice in the good that come from His design.
God's plan ain't a free pass. Uh-uh. He give us moments to make choices, and we make them. We accountable for those choices. God's job ain't to make our lives easier, it's to make us better souls by the lessons he give us. I tell you now, I wouldn't change one choice I made since I met you. No matter what. — Susan Crandall

We can find true refuge within our own hearts and minds-right here, right now, in the midst of our moment-to-momen t lives. — Tara Brach

Don't you know by now?" Thomas said, touching his lips to my hair. "It's somewhere in the unforeseen when the best, most important moments of our lives seem to happen. — Jamie McGuire

Only in hindsight can we see the moments where our lives skewed off-course, where we traveled down the wrong path, where the worst lies we told were the ones we told ourselves. — Emma Shane

The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives; while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments ... these rooms are future ruins — Anne Lamott

Amaya rested her face in the palms of her hands. She closed her eyes, trying to remember a happier time. "Look at us, Polly. Three days ago, our lives were great and now look at us." Apollo went to his sister, and sat down on a bumpy extended part of the wall next to where she stood. He grabbed her hand and pulled her down to sit next to him. When she did, he put his arm around her shoulders. After a few moments of thinking, Apollo looked at his sister. He studied her face. He felt the distance that still lingered between them. "I'm just as scared as you are. Maybe even more. — April M. Reign

I've always believed there are moments in our lives which can be defined as a transition between the before and after, between the cause and the effect. — Benjamin X. Wretlind

The world comes to us in fragments and shards. Whatever stories we shape from our days, we're always dealing with gaps, blank-spots, and blackouts - and in handling all these breakages, we are, at all times, so incredibly intimate with sharp edges, the unending knife-like moments of failure and joy in our lives. — Alex Lemon

If we can practice opening to the crises in our personal lives as teaching moments, as evolutionary stepping stones, we will be far better prepared emotionally and spiritually for the trauma that collapse will foist on us and everyone around us. — Carolyn Baker

Good habits are developed in the workshops of our daily lives. It is not in the great moments of test and trial that character is built. That is only when it is displayed. The habits that direct our lives and form our character are fashioned in the often uneventful, commonplace routine of life. — Delbert L. Stapley

People who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles. — Christina Baker Kline

I think the saddest moments in life have humor in them. I have a memory of coming home from a funeral with my family in the back of a limousine and someone cracking a joke and us just hysterically belly laughing. It's how we always dealt with tragedy in our lives and I think it's such a healthy way to deal with sadness. — Zach Braff

Because here's something that's weird but true: we don't actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating. Don't trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn't. And that's not worth much. Just — Mark Manson

So here we are, in our rare and precious lives, surrounded by gorgeous moments begging to be noticed and celebrated. Go! Celebrate! — SARK

Everything happens for a reason? I don't see it that way at all. To me, only the first part is clear: Everything happens. Then other things happen, and other things, still. Out of each of these moments, we make something. Any number of somethings, in fact.

What comes of our own actions becomes the "reason." It is no predestined thing. We may arrive where we are by way of a specific path - we can take just one at a time - but it's never the only one that could have led us to our destination. Nor does a single event, even a string of them, point decisively to a single landing spot. There are infinite possible versions of our lives. Meaning is not what happens, but what we do with what happens when it does. — Jessica Fechtor

The power paradox is this: we rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst. We gain a capacity to make a difference in the world by enhancing the lives of others, but the very experience of having power and privilege leads us to behave, in our worst moments, like impulsive, out-of-control sociopaths. — Dacher Keltner

It is given that we'll face difficulties and breaking points in our lives but with them we'll also have lots of positive moments. We only have to recognize them and let them be. We shouldn't burden those few positive moments with the negatives in our lives or we're going to just ruin them. — Zainab T. Khan