Brenda Shaughnessy Quotes

#1. We all make mistakes and do things we wish we could take back, but it is what we do after that truly matters ... and I like your after.

Lisa De Jong

#2. Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die. / It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would.

Brenda Shaughnessy

#3. I've been melted into something
too easy to spill. I make more
and more of myself in order
to make more and more of the baby.
He takes it, this making. And somehow
he's made more of me, too.

Brenda Shaughnessy

#4. What if all possible
pain was only the grief of truth?

Brenda Shaughnessy

#5. When all the girls were getting all made up and getting into all that girl stuff in junior high I was out playing softball or touch football with the guys.

Catherine Bell

#6. Where can we
go if not to each other,
resenting every step?

Brenda Shaughnessy

#7. Death and life are, for most of us, too complex to comprehend, but Alex Lemon can pretty casually, accurately, and marvelously correlate them to heavy metal and birthday cake.

Brenda Shaughnessy

#8. It seems unlikely that so much literature
could be made from twenty-six letters.
Doesn't it seem it could all be boiled
down to one sentence?

Brenda Shaughnessy

#9. Because what nobody ever understood is that I, too, wanted to be a somebody. But how do you go through life wanting to be a someone and not knowing how?

Debbi Fields

#10. All gifts are riddles, all lives/are in the middle of mother-lives.

Brenda Shaughnessy

#11. I came to see that what constitutes strength is not just a muscle or will. It can also include the most desperate vulnerability, the saddest heartache, the lightest, sweetest laughter.

Brenda Shaughnessy

#12. Everyone thinks that religion is the ball and chain. But the reality is that sin is the ball and chain. A relationship with Christ is the freedom that people are looking for in alcohol and drugs.

Dan Brown

#13. Secret, smug believers! God never gives you
more than you can bear, they like to say, as if
the strong should be punished for their strength:
We can bear it. So we got it.
But what about my baby? How weak does
a newborn have to be to escape God's burdens?

Brenda Shaughnessy

#14. It's a writer's or director's role to be cerebral, whereas for an actor it should be a visceral, gut thing. When the action starts, it's best to turn the brain off and let it become an instinctual thing.

Natalie Dormer

#15. You are not broken. You break again
and again because

that's what breaking means.
To be whole.

Brenda Shaughnessy

#16. Strength means ... acknowledging each of those feelings, your questions and ideas and faith and terror, and meeting what comes with the full force of your heart.

Brenda Shaughnessy

#17. How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery.

Brenda Shaughnessy

#18. Getting angry with her cousin, she reminded herself, was like getting angry with a sheep for being stupid. It ruined your day and the sheep was too dim to care.

Ruth Downie

#19. Strength means honoring your entire range of emotion, even your despair and heartbreak.

Brenda Shaughnessy