Anna White Quotes

#1. There's too much pain and uncertainty in the world. You should seize happiness whenever it comes, and hold onto it for as long as you can.

Anna White

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. I realized that I was okay with myself. I was quirky and withdrawn and loud, but I liked that. I smiled at strangers without thinking they were going to attack me and drag me into their cars. I went to doctors' offices and touched magazines that had been touched by sick people.

Anna White

#8. I've always let my imagination run free, but now I try to rein it in. Things never turn out the way I imagine, so I am letting them rest. Instead, I am holding just what is in my hand.

Anna White

#9. 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

#10. The road to the heart is not a long, linear path, but this turning. There is no race or competition, just me and God going deeper, carving a canyon to the soul.

Anna White

#11. The shadow is dark and the woods are cold, but they are not endless. No matter how lost you are now, you are not lost forever. You are findable.
Love just keeps on looking.
Love is forever tries.

Anna White

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. The first night in the hospital with a snuffling baby girl, I learned that my family was not the only thing that had expanded. There was now a whole new world of opportunities for judgment and self-doubt.

Anna White

#15. Love lights our darkness. It is forever tries.

Anna White

#16. Acts of love, for me, are leaps of bravery.

Anna White

#17. Now I know this is going to seem counter to every instinct that you have, but I'm going to ask you to sit still, or I'll put you in the trunk.

Anna White

#18. The most amazing thing is that all my sorrows, all of my darkest moments, are becoming my gifts.

Anna White

#19. The griefs that have been hardest for me were the ones I didn't recognize as griefs, because they came in what were supposed to be the best times of my life. No one whispered in my ear that the best times, the ones that change our lives, are woven with the thread of loss.

Anna White

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. This is the only advice I offer you. Pick the small thing, and carry it on. Let it change your life.

Anna White

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. I believe God lets us stumble along, slowly finding our way, and giving us chances to pick each other up.

Anna White

#27. It is a beautiful and scary thing to sit open-handed and let all your plans float away like dust.

Anna White

#28. There's always a choice," Lucian reassured her. "Always." He kissed her
forehead softly. "I love you," he said. He lips trailed down her face, brushing slowly over her nose, across her eyelids. "I would stay with you forever, until the end of
Time.

Anna White

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. God wants to take the fears that you and I are holding onto with both hands. He throws them aside, effortless, and then takes our empty hands in His and fills them with his love. He is not a hard driver. He wants to provide.

Anna White

#34. I grew up believing Christians didn't just believe in Jesus. To be saved, people had to look and speak a certain way. They followed a long list of nots to ensure their holiness. They fit the mold. They followed the rules.

Anna White

#35. I've had a lot of therapists, so I've had the opportunity to approach my fear in many different ways. I've faced it head on and sideways and tried to tiptoe up behind it.

Anna White

#36. 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

#37. All I'm saying is that I don't want to sort of fall in love with fifty different people. I'd rather find one person and fall completely, deeply in over my head.

Anna White

#38. Everything we have, everything we are, is a gift.
How can we judge and shame ourselves if this is true?

Anna White

#39. 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

#40. I think this is the essence of life: to be willing circle back, to fall in deeper, to relearn what I thought I already knew.

Anna White

#41. I was taught growing up not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers, to withdraw myself from the sinful 'others'. But we are all others. We are all sinners in someone's eyes.

Anna White

#42. In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and remind us to go all in, because life is short. The joy edges the pain and gives us a reason to rise.

Anna White

#43. 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