Quotes That Have Helped Me Get Through 2020

Here are my favorite quotes from my reading this year.

"You do not think yourself into a new way of living as much as you live your way into a new way of thinking."

— Richard Rohr, Yes, and...: Daily Meditations

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"The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better."

— Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality

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"There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high."

— Michelle Obama, Becoming

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"Our charge is not to save the world....It is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble." 

― Courtney Martin, quoted in Krista Tippett's Becoming Wise

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“We have to muster the moral strength to reimagine America....The moral stamina to fight this fight requires that we cultivate our own elsewhere, because the one 'who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle....' We have to find and rest in a community of love....In our time, with so much hatred and venom in our politics and our culture, we must actively cultivate communities of love that allow us to imagine different ways of being together.”

― Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

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“Breathe, darling. This is just a chapter. It's not your whole story.”

― S. C. Lourie, quoted in Hoda Kotb's I Really Needed This Today

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"Instead of pathologizing every human quirk, we should say, By the grace of this behavior, this individual has found it possible to continue."

— Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments

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“In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.”

― Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson

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“But now ask the beasts, and let them teach you; And the birds of the heavens, and let them tell you. Or speak to the Earth, and let it teach you; And the fish of the sea declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this, In whose hand is the life of every living thing, And the breath of all mankind?”

― Job 12:7-10

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“Swifts aren't always cresting the atmospheric boundary layer at dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick and complicated air. That's where they feed and mate and bathe and drink and are. But to find out about the important things that affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene, and there communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on their realm....Not all of us need to make that climb...but as a community, surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the everyday.”

― Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights

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"Let's see what love can do." 

― Julia Alvarez, Afterlife

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Do any of these speak to you? 

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Each Tuesday That Artsy Reader Girl assigns a topic and then post her top ten list that fits that topic. You’re more than welcome to join her and create your own top ten (or 2, 5, 20, etc.) list as well. Feel free to put a unique spin on the topic to make it work for you! Please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own post so that others know where to find more information.