The Choice: Embrace The Possible Quotes
"This moment is a threshold into the major losses of my life."
"Our childhood memories are often fragments, brief moments or encounters, which together form the scrapbook of our life."
"'Read to me,' she says, and I fetch the worn copy of Gone with the Wind from her bedside table."
"'As God is my witness,' Scarlett says, 'I’m never going to be hungry again.'"
"Memory is sacred ground. But it’s haunted too."
"Maybe every childhood is the terrain on which we try to pinpoint how much we matter and how much we don’t."
"It took me many decades to discover that I could come at my life with a different question. Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?"
"I don’t know if the longing is hers or mine or something we share."
"'I’m glad you have brains because you have no looks,' she has told me more than once."
"I pray for his sake, that he won’t have the need to kill me."
"If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free."
"The "shoulds" aren’t important. They aren’t the only kind of governance."
"We are like the head of a dandelion gone to seed and blown by the wind, only a few white tufts remaining."
"To feel death’s proximity, death’s imminence, in the straight stack of brick—to see the chimney that is a bridge, that will house your passage from flesh to air—to consider yourself already dead—makes a certain kind of sense."
"To eat grass or to eat flesh. To eat this blade or that one."
"If you live, you’ve got to stand for something."
"If Imre goes to Sydney, we will go there too."
"You’ll be married soon. You’ll see. No one is sexier than you."
"Always use your beautiful things. You never know when they’ll be gone."
"For every page I read, I want to write ten. What if telling my story could lighten its grip instead of tightening it? What if speaking about the past could heal it instead of calcify it? What if silence and denial aren’t the only choices to make in the wake of catastrophic loss?"
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."
"We can’t choose to vanish the dark, but we can choose to kindle the light."
"You give children a name, and they play the game."
"I had learned this the hard way, after decades of choosing to be frozen and numb. Like Jason, I had bottled my feelings, I had put on a mask."
"If you kill his mother, won’t you be hurting your son?"
"A man is invulnerable; a man doesn’t cry; a man is in control; a man calls the shots."
"Sometimes the worst moments in our lives, the moments that set us spinning with ugly desires, that threaten to unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure, are in fact the moments that bring us to understand our worth."
"Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel spinning."
"We can’t erase the pain. But we are free to accept who we are and what has been done to us, and move on."
"A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth."
"I prayed for the ability to meet him with love. I summoned every image I had of unconditional love."
"Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength."
"There is no one-size-fits-all template for healing, but there are steps that can be learned and practiced, steps that each individual can weave together in his or her own way, steps in the dance of freedom."
"There is no equation that can adequately summarize the effect of such total loss. There is no language that can explain the systematic inhumanity of this human-made death factory."
"I can’t ever change the past. But there is a life I can save: It is mine. The one I am living right now, this precious moment."
"Do something fun and get out of the familiar."
"Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life…"
"When we abdicate taking responsibility for ourselves, we are giving up our ability to create and discover meaning."
"Taking risks doesn’t mean throwing ourselves blindly into danger. But it means embracing our fears so that we aren’t imprisoned by them."
"It’s not what’s happening outside that matters, it’s what’s inside."
"Freedom lies in examining the choices available to us and examining the consequences of those choices."
"Strength isn’t reacting, it’s responding—feeling your feelings, thinking them over, and planning an effective action to bring you closer to your goal."
"Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief."
"You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now."