Bittersweet Quotes

“It's not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What's hard, she said, is figuring out what you're willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Everybody has a home team: It’s the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It’s the people who, near or far, know everything that’s wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets, who get themselves a glass of water without asking when they’re at your house. These are the people who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I've spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough they won't leave, and fearing that it's a matter of time before they figure me out and go.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don't lose yourself at happy hour, but don't lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“...sometimes the happiest ending isn't the one you keep longing for, but something you absolutely cannot see from where you are.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“When things fall apart, the broken pieces allow all sorts of things to enter, and one of them is the presence of God.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I believe that suffering is part of the narrative, and that nothing really good gets built when everything's easy. I believe that loss and emptiness and confusion often give way to new fullness and wisdom.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I think preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits. Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“My life is a story about who God is and what He does in a human heart.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Many of the most deeply spiritual moments of my life haven't happened just in my mind or in my soul. They happened while holding my son in the middle of the night, or watching the water break along the shore, or around my table, watching the people I love feel nourished in all sorts of ways.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I believe deeply that God does his best work in our lives during times of great heartbreak and loss, and I believe that much of that rich work is done by the hands of people who love us, who dive into the wreckage with us and show us who God is, over and over and over. There are years when the Christmas spirit is hard to come by, and it’s in those seasons when I’m so thankful for Advent. Consider it a less flashy but still very beautiful way of being present to this season. Give up for a while your false and failing attempts at merriment, and thank God for thin places, and for Advent, for a season that understands longing and loneliness and long nights. Let yourself fall open to Advent, to anticipation, to the belief that what is empty will be filled, what is broken will be repaired, and what is lost can always be found, no matter how many times it’s been lost.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“The grandest seduction of all is the myth that DOING EVERYTHING BETTER gets us where we want to be. It gets us somewhere, certainly, but not anywhere worth being.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Grace isn’t about having a second chance; grace is having so many chances that you could use them through all eternity and never come up empty. It’s when you finally realize that the other shoe isn’t going to drop, ever.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I know now that I can make it through more than I thought, with less than I thought. I know better than to believe that the changes are over, and I know better than to believe the next ones will be easier, but I've learned the hard way that change is one of God's greatest gifts and one of his most useful tools.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“But our hearts are more elastic than we think, and the work of forgiveness and transformation and growth can do things you can't even imagine from where you're standing now.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I believe that God is making all things new. I believe that Christ overcame death and that pattern is apparent all through life and history: life from death, water from a stone, redemption from failure, connection from alienation. I believe that suffering is part of the narrative, and that nothing really good gets built when everything's easy.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“...now that I am a mother, I understand what Mother's Day is about: it's about looking through our lives and recognizing the act of mothering everywhere we see it, and more than that, recognizing that when any of us mother-- when we listen, nuture, nourish, protect--we're doing sacred work.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Life hands us opportunities at every turn to get over ourselves, to get outside ourselves, to wake up from our own bad dreams and realize that really lovely things are happening all the time.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Every year, you will trade a little of your perfect skin and your ability to look great without exercising for wisdom and peace and groundedness, and every year the trade will be worth it. I promise.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Some of the most life-shaping decisions you make in this season will be about walking away from good-enough, in search of can’t-live-without.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“If what it takes for you this year to be present in this sacred, thin place, to feel the breath and presence of a Holy God, is to forgo the cookies and the cards and the rushing and the lists, then we’ll be all right with cookies from the store and a few less gifts. It would be a great loss for you to miss this season, the soul of it, because you’re too busy pushing and rushing. And it would be a great loss if the people in your life receive your perfectly wrapped gifts, but not your love or your full attention or your spirit. This is my prayer for us, that we would give and receive the most important gifts this season—the palpable presence of a Holy God, the kindness of well-chosen words, the generosity of spirit and soul. My prayer is that what you’ve lost, and what I’ve lost this year, will fade a little bit in the beauty of this season, that for a few moments at least, what is right and good and worth believing will outshine all the darkness, within us and around us. And I hope that someone who loves you gives you a really cute scarf. Merry Christmas.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I don't always change my clothes just because I'm leaving the house. I wear yoga pants 99 percent of the time, and I pretend that other people don't notice that I'm wearing my pajamas in public.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Sometimes we have to leave home in order to find out what we left there, and why it matters so much.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“...when I've practiced acceptance, when I've floated instead of fought, when I've rested, even for a moment, on the surface instead of wrestling the water itself. And those moments are like heaven.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Bittersweet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a sliver of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich when it contains a splinter of sadness. Bittersweet is the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul. Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way