J. B. Priestley Quotes

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.

Grace flows most refreshingly through the faucet of brokenness.

I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage.

What once seemed such a curse has become a blessing. All the agony that threatened to destroy my life now seems like the fertile ground for greater trust, stronger hope, and deeper love.

My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.

Suffering is traumatic and awful and we get angry and we shake our fists at the heavens and we vent and rage and weep. But in the process we discover a new tomorrow, one we never would have imagined otherwise.

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.

I love the concept of the romance that exists when people are broken. Like, the promise of a romance when you're at the bottom. I think that's infinitely compelling and romantic.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

From our ugliness will grow the soul of the world.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

There's something which impels us to show our inner souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn't know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn't even smell like smoke.

Speaking my truth. I think that's the number one thing, man. That's my 2018 mantra. Speak your truth, because you hold all that in, it's going to destroy you.

Sometimes, it's hard holding back the truth, how you really feel, and sometimes the best way is let it out and move forward.

Honesty, vulnerability, pain - these are things that always supersede the trends of the day.

Being vulnerable is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength.

I used to think that if someone asked for help, they were weak. But the toughest thing I ever did was reach out and ask for help. And that was when I started to heal.

Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it - it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy... When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.

Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

Change doesn't have to be hard, and healing doesn't have to hurt. Surely by now you know that every thing happens for a reason! There is something better awaiting you on the other side of this.

Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.

Our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.