Quotes About Healing

Oh sweetheart, do you really think if you seal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?

When the dead are done with the living," Franny said to me, "the living can go on to other things.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

No one knew how he continued to do what he did, while simultaneously they wanted him to shut all signs of his grief away, place it in a file somewhere and tuck it in a drawer that no one would be asked to open again.

Try to breathe, he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn't Fuck you. I breathed.

Like someone who has survived a gun-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.

Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

Helped are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth. -----"The Gospel According to Shug

You think you can avoid [pain,] but you actually can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing.

T}here is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.

The heaving sickness past, her nausea gone, her bodily fluids replaced, she felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the canyon's walls, she owned them not at all; her floor, the river beach. Her view, the heavens. It was, this freedom she was in, the longed-for cathedral of her dreams.

No one escapes a time in life when the arrow of sorrow, of anger, of despair pierces the heart. For many of us, there is the inevitable need to circle the wound. It is often such a surprise to find it there, in us, when we had assumed arrows so painful only landed in the hearts of other people. Some of us spend decades screaming at the archer. Or at least for longer periods than are good for us. How to take the arrow out of the heart? How to learn to relieve our own pain? That is the question.

Healing begins where the wound was made.

How do we make new and restorative of soul the old pain? How do we learn to carry with grace and humor all that has happened to us?

Who is it that most needs forgiving? Who is it that feels so much pain? Who is it that would really like to fly Far far away? Who is that can return Free and gentle Like the rain? It is the Self, my love, My adored one, It is the Self That even now It is running for its Life Running to its life Into the arms Of death.

I talk to myself a lot, standing in front the mirror. Celie, I say, happiness was just a trick in your case. Just cause you never had any before Shug, you thought it was time to have some, and that it was gon last. Even thought you had the trees with you. The whole earth. The stars. But look at you. When Shug left, happiness desert.

Try not to hold her fears against her. At the end she understood, and believed. And forgave-whatever there was to forgive.

But when I hear them together all I can do is pull the quilt over my head and finger my little button and titties and cry.

There is a way forward and yes it is with a broken heart but it is our own way collectively convened, pondered, shared.

In our despair that justice is slow we sit with heads bowed wondering how even whether we will ever be healed. Perhaps it is a question only the ravaged the violated seriously ask. And is that not now almost all of us? But hope is on the way. As usual Hope is a woman herding her children around her all she retains of who she was; as usual except for her kids she has lost almost everything. Hope is a woman who has lost her fear.

breaking the heart opens it.