Mended Quotes

“Maybe it’s not about having a beautiful day, but about finding beautiful moments. Maybe a whole day is just too much to ask. I could choose to believe that in every day, in all things, no matter how dark and ugly, there are shards of beauty if I look for them.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I think this is what we all want to hear: that we are not alone in hitting the bottom, and that it is possible to come out of that place courageous, beautiful, and strong.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“My fear of being real, of being seen, paralyzes me into silence. I crave the touch and the connection, but I’m not always brave enough to open my hand and reach out. This is the great challenge: to be seen, accepted, and loved, I must first reveal, offer, and surrender.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I'm broken, but I have to learn how to live. I feel stuck together with scotch tape, like after any breath everything could come apart. If it does, if it all comes undone, I think I'll fall down and never rise again.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I want to share my story, and I want to know yours. I believe with all my heart that sharing our stories, the real, ugly, broken ones, is one of the most powerful things in the world, because to share our story we must first accept it. We must own it. We must stop running from it or shoving it into the corner when company comes over. To share our story is to admit that we've been changed.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I believe God lets us stumble along, slowly finding our way, and giving us chances to pick each other up.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“Being broken isn't the worst thing. We can be mended and put together again. We don’t have to be ashamed of our past. We can embrace the history that gives us value, and see our cracks as beautiful.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I am still not good enough. I am still not whole enough. I am still not pure enough. I am still weakness and sharp edges and broken, but He is good and pure and whole, all that I strive for but am not.

I wake up every morning and I sit in silence and I choose to believe. I may speak. I may not. I let Him wrap up all my broken in to His grace. He takes me imperfect. This is the great mystery I never knew.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“There are lots of real reasons to decide to leave something or someone, but there are lots of other reasons that are less valid and less real and less about a relationship than our own minds: Fear (of screwing up, of being left, of not being good enough), restlessness, resistance to growing up, PMS, not knowing how to live without drama, fearing that you're getting happy, and happiness is boring.

The thing that scared me the most was the knowledge that if I stayed, something was going to change, and that something was probably me. I didn't know what changed me would look like, or if I would like her more or less than I already did. Would I still recognize myself? Would I still be myself?”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“It is the capacity to feel consuming grief and pain and despair that also allows me to embrace love and joy and beauty with my whole heart. I must let it all in.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I know what it's like to sleep in fear, to starve myself to be worthy, to be ashamed of my voice, to want to sleep forever. To question why I deserve to live.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I felt like I was being carried over the threshold of a sisterhood of loss. I knew I was not walking alone, and that eventually I would bob back up to the surface of the deep, because the women around me showed me what healing looks like.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I name you today, heart fears. I am small, but you are smaller. You will not stop me. You have a voice, fears, and I must listen, but then I will open my heart. I will love you right to death.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I want my heart to be the thin place. I don't want to board a plane to feel the kiss of heaven. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. I want my fragile, hurting heart, to recognize fleeting kairos, eternal moments as they pass. I want to be my own mountain and my own retreat.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“Every day is a new beginning, the building of a habit. Every action is a step in some direction. There is no pause in living.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“The idea of practicing love is deeply appealing to me, because built right in is an acceptance of imperfection. There is an acknowledgment to myself that I am going to mess this up, an understanding that there is room to grow. Each of my failures just affirms the truth that we are all starting over and rising again.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I am not enough in myself; I can barely make it through buying milk and school supplies. Thank goodness there is a Guardian to come before me and throw off the dark.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“A basic reality of life is that we all struggle. We hurt and have hurt other people. We all feel lost sometimes.
This isn’t all we are, but it is a part of who we are. The only question I have when I’m with someone is, “Can they admit it? And will they let me admit it too?”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I believe in beauty. I believe in goodness. I believe in the power of turning: the other cheek, time, curve of the earth.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“Love has no demand of us but to keep practicing, to do the next hard thing. Love says, Come dear. Take the next step.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I love that there's no cutoff where we get labeled and sent off to a home for hopeless, cranky, depressives. Every day is a new chance to listen longer and be braver and love more. We get to try again and again and again.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you’re like me, when you just sit quietly, just be, and let yourself feel what you feel, the guilt creeps in. Because you’re alive and the world is big, and you should be feeling some freakin’ Christmas spirit.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“My husband says this longing for isolation is not a good quality, that if I wanted to be a hermit I should have moved to the West Coast and adopted a lot of cats, not gotten married and had children that demand to be fed several times a day.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“After giving it some thought, I've decided to name my monkey mind Ricky Bobby. I was thinking about Latin names like Javier, but I don't want to make my jumping, distractable self sound mysterious and sexy. Ricky Bobby makes me laugh. A name like that seems silly, not strong. Just a goofy little thing that doesn't know what to do with its hands, likes to go fast, and loves tiny, infant, baby Jesus.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“It is a beautiful and scary thing to sit open-handed and let all your plans float away like dust.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“Truth: last week I online shopped too much. Then I ate 2 pounds of jelly beans to feel better about that. In fact, while I was trying to read soul-nourishing things all I could think about was shopping and jellybeans. Points to the monkey mind.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“All of my secrets and scars and wishes and dreams can live together in this one body without shame, without blame, and without fear. I am all loved, all accepted, and all in service to God. In his eyes, regardless of what I did or didn’t do today, I am loved. I am His, so I am enough.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“I doubt that anyone has a Damascus moment after experiencing discrimination. Most people seem to have shining moments of change after experiencing grace.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“This is the only advice I offer you. Pick the small thing, and carry it on. Let it change your life.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“Father, be near as we are surrounded by this cloud of deep suffering. Open our eyes to see that you are all things, the light and the darkness, not only those things that seem good in our eyes, but the horrifying unexplainable. Wrap us up inside of the cloud and reveal the mysteries that can only be learned in places of sorrow, that when we walk out we will be as Moses, transformed by the shadow and beaming with the radiant light of your glory. Give us the strength to love on, though our hearts are broken.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith