Emily Bett Rickards Quotes

If somebody comes to a neighborhood coffee hour, or goes to a discussion group, and they have a discussion, I do think that people really walk away with a real understanding of the issues.

I love engaging in conversation with other moms because we can relate to one another, and we swap valuable insight and information.

You learn a lot about each other from a tour, musically and humanly.

I hardly teach. It's more like a gathering of minds looking at one subject and learning from each other. I enjoy the process.

It's group therapy for the world.

I feel we have the opportunity of being part of a new and emerging category for human co-experience.

If we're by ourselves we come to feel crazy and alone. We need to make alternate families of small groups of women who support each other, talk to each other regularly, can speak their truths and their experiences and find they're not alone in them, that other women have them, too ... It makes such a huge difference.

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.

...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

I know this because Tyler knows this.

A university should not be an island where academics attain higher and higher levels of knowledge without sharing any of this knowledge with its neighbours.

The youth say stupid things and they say good things, as we do, as everyone does. But hear them, speak with them, because we must learn from them and they must learn from me, from us.

Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.

The one thing we can all relate to is family, and family has its traumas sometimes. Sometimes things don't go well for people. Sometimes things are tough. So everybody kind of knows someone who's been in this situation before, and I think that's what makes it work.

What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.

Living in a small town you couldn't go anywhere on a Saturday where a store had the game on. If you were downtown you heard the game. If you were at the gas station you heard the game. I remember I would be mowing the lawn and I would stop for the Nebraska game. I would have it cranking outside.

It's strange how we always want other people to feel what we feel. It must be a basic human drive. Misery loves company, right? Or when you see a movie that you love, don't you want to drag all your friends to see it as well? Because it's only good the second time if it's the first time for somebody else—as if their experience somehow resonates inside of you.

If there's a feeling you have, other people have it. If there's something weird about your life, other people have lived it. If there's something kooky about your body, other people have that, too. We're not alone. There's some kind of tremendous relief in that and I think it can only be expressed in belly laughter. This tremendous relief that happens the millisecond we realize, it's not just me. That's what good laughter is about. It's about knowing that you're not alone.

Love . . . includes fellowship in suffering, in joy and in effort.

Community [is] a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to "rejoice together, mourn together," and to "delight in each other, make others' conditions our own.

Happily, though we must each walk through life on our own, we don't have to do it alone.

Men who know the same things are not long the best company for each other.

I try to find something that applies not to me only, but to others, but don't try to control it too much. Essentially it is about what moves us, teaches us about ourselves.

I’m trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me.

I think something happens only when people find that they are moved with others, find themselves linked or allied in new ways, showing up or speaking out in ways that resonate with one another. That resonating can be very compelling and lead to moving and speaking more emphatically and with sharper focus.