Top 160 Lisa Wingate Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Forgive me, Father. Forgive my weakness. Forgive my wondering. Bring me to those beautiful shores of home and let me content my feet in the soft sands of all that you have prepared for me. Let me be thankful for all that you have given, neither hungering nor thirsting for what is not my cup. Your.”

— Lisa Wingate

52. “Books made me believe that smart girls who didn’t necessarily fit in with the popular crowd could be the ones to solve mysteries, rescue people in distress, ferret out international criminals, fly spaceships to distant planets, take up arms and fight battles. Books showed me that not all fathers understand their daughters or even seek to, but that people can turn out okay despite that. Books made me feel beautiful when I wasn’t. Capable when I couldn’t be.”

— Lisa Wingate

53. “A good heart can’t ever let the bad get in, Mama’s voice whispers in my head. You got a good heart, Hannie. Don’t let the bad get in you. Don’t open the door to it, no matter how much it comes knockin’ or how sweet it sounds askin’.”

— Lisa Wingate

54. “Ever’body got story. Ever’body got a reason for what they do. You eat off somebody else’s plate, drink a their cup, could be, you’d be the same way.”

— Lisa Wingate

55. “The thing about so many of the kids here – country kids, town kids, a sad majority of these kids – is that their norm is constant drama, constant escalation. Conversations start, grow louder, get ugly, get personal.”

— Lisa Wingate

56. “Books made me believe that smart girls who didn’t necessarily fit in with the popular crowd could be the ones to solve mysteries, rescue people in distress, ferret out international criminals, fly spaceships to distant planets, take up arms and fight battles... Books made me feel beautiful when I wasn’t. Capable when I couldn’t be. Books built my identity.”

— Lisa Wingate

57. “Do we carry the guilt from the sins of past generations? If so, can we bear the weight of that burden?”

— Lisa Wingate

58. “You can’t fix the past. You can only change your way of reacting to it.”

— Lisa Wingate

59. “The funny thing about having people believe good things about you is that, without even realizing it, you want to make those things true.”

— Lisa Wingate

60. “Happiness is not in getting what you want, but in learning to want what you get. Don’t waste your time crying over what you’re not given. When you have tears in your eyes, you can’t see all the beautiful things around you.”

— Lisa Wingate

61. “Secrets ain’t a healthy thang. Secrets ain’t a healthy thang, no matter how old they is.”

— Lisa Wingate

62. “The secret to a happy life is not in getting what you want. It is in learning to want what you get.”

— Lisa Wingate

63. “I clench my teeth so hard the pain travels all the way to the top of my head. I’m glad for it. It’s just a little ache, and I know where it comes from. I can stop it any time I want. The one in my heart is way bigger. I can’t fix it no matter how hard I try. It scares me so much that I can’t even breathe.”

— Lisa Wingate

64. “I want a pain that has a beginning and an end, not one that goes on forever and cuts all the way to the bone.”

— Lisa Wingate

65. “Ultimately, it’s not so much what life deals you as what you choose to own that matters, a spiritually searching law clerk had once said to.”

— Lisa Wingate

66. “It pleasured him to believe that we were happy, that all us stayed with him because we wanted to, not because we had to, that we didn’t want to be free. I imagine that’s what he told hisself to make it right.”

— Lisa Wingate

67. “Living, really living, wasn’t about clinging to control but about giving it away.”

— Lisa Wingate

68. “No matter how much you want to cut your family out of your heart, you can’t. The bond is born when you are born, like an organ in your body. There is no surgery to remove it. When it is diseased, you live with a dull ache telling you that something inside you is not right.”

— Lisa Wingate

69. “How wonderful the days when all was well. How necessary, also, that we must release them now. It is fine enough to glance at the past, but one must never focus there overlong. Don’t you think?”

— Lisa Wingate

70. “I remember lost loves, and loves that never were.”

— Lisa Wingate

71. “Is survival sometimes about death and rebirth? Egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly?”

— Lisa Wingate

72. “The rainbows of life come after the storms.”

— Lisa Wingate

73. “Happiness doesn’t grow where impatience grazes.”

— Lisa Wingate

74. “I always assume people’s behaviors are a reaction to something I’ve done, not that they’re just doing their thing.”

— Lisa Wingate

75. “Oh, child. The best thing is to know. I always tell ’em, best to be who you is. What you is deep down inside. Ain’t no other good way of livin’.”

— Lisa Wingate

76. “A man who doesn’t stand for what is right dies his own death well before it happens.”

— Lisa Wingate

77. “Father, help these young people to see. Help them to show the world that our greatness is not in things we do for ourselves, but in things we do for others. In power that channels itself into kindness, in a hand outstretched in love.”

— Lisa Wingate

78. “Eventually you have to stop letting people define you and start defining yourself. It’s a lesson I’m both teaching and learning.”

— Lisa Wingate

79. “The depth of my love for him, of my need for him poured over me, both painful and sweet, both comforting and frightening. If anything happened to him, I didn’t know how I would keep going.”

— Lisa Wingate

80. “It’s a lesson I’m trying to learn from him, this living squarely in the present. I am a planner and a worrier. I torment myself by mentally replaying my past mistakes, wishing I’d been smarter, wishing I’d been stronger, wishing I’d made different choices. I live too often in the realm of what if. I also expend time and mental energy continually trying to anticipate what sort of crouching tiger might be hiding around the next corner.”

— Lisa Wingate

81. “I decipher the brewing machine because I am, after all, trained to save lives, and this is a life-or-death situation. We need coffee. Now. Or heads will roll.”

— Lisa Wingate

82. “Even the ramparts of reputation, and ambition, and social position couldn’t erase the love of sisters, their bond with one another. Suddenly, the barriers that created their need for hidden lives and secret meeting places seem almost as cruel as those of brokered adoptions, altered paperwork, and forced separations.”

— Lisa Wingate

83. “Maybe you should start wanting less.”

— Lisa Wingate

84. “Stories change people. History, real history, helps people understand each other, see each other from the inside out.”

— Lisa Wingate

85. “Through all my adult life, I had wanted to know exactly where I was going and what path to take to get there. I had never considered the beauty of where I was.”

— Lisa Wingate

86. “I hold Huckleberry Finn real tight against my chest and start across the yard. Now we can leave this place behind anytime we want. All we gotta do is join up with Huckleberry Finn. There’s room on his raft for all five of us, I’ll bet. Maybe we’ll find the Arcadia out there somewhere. Even though I have to head back to Mrs. Murphy’s house, it feels like a whole new place. Now it’s got a river in it. That.”

— Lisa Wingate

87. “Even when we are lost, God has not lost us.”

— Lisa Wingate

88. “Parenthood is the only career in which the better you do your job, the sooner you’re fired.”

— Lisa Wingate

89. “Hardship finds its way into every life. It’s just much easier to see our own than other people’s. Hannah.”

— Lisa Wingate

90. “I need more pieces to the puzzle, but no one is going to hand them to me. I have to find them. Dig them from their hiding places, from the ground and the people. Listen, the road seems to admonish. Listen. I have stories. I close my eyes, and I hear voices. Thousands whispering all at once. I can’t make out any single one, but I know they’re here. What do they have to say?”

— Lisa Wingate

91. “Mother told me,” he sighs. “She’d been over to Drayden Hill to get a baby fix, since your sister and Courtney and the boys are visiting. Now she’s on the grandkid kick again.” Elliot is understandably frustrated. “She reminded me that I’m thirty-one already, and she’s fifty-seven, and she doesn’t want to be an old grandmother.”

— Lisa Wingate

92. “Story people are a bit like real people––no matter where their humble beginnings may lie, their journeys are shaped by family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and all manner of acquaintances. Some encourage them, some guide them, some offer them unconditional love, some teach them, some challenge them to be their best. This story, like most stories, owes its existence to a village of unique and generous individuals.”

— Lisa Wingate

93. “In my multifold years of life, I have learned that most people get along as best they can. They don’t intend to hurt anyone. It is merely a terrible by-product of surviving.”

— Lisa Wingate

94. “The most important skill in life is to learn the acceptance of that which you have not planned for yourself.”

— Lisa Wingate

95. “But you just keep wagging your pricey manicure and that horse-choking diamond bracelet at me. That helps make it all seem so much more right.”

— Lisa Wingate

96. “One of the best things a father can do for his daughter is let her know that she has met his expectations.”

— Lisa Wingate

97. “She always wanted those around her to see the greatest possible versions of themselves. That passion made her a fantastic teacher.”

— Lisa Wingate

98. “No way out but through the storm now.”

— Lisa Wingate

99. “I want them to see that there is no faster way to change your circumstance than to open a great book.”

— Lisa Wingate

100. “In a fractured world, sensitivities related to race, economic class, and geographical dialects have justly increased. Modern ears don’t skip casually over words that would have been commonplace a half century ago, or variations in dialect that remain the norm in other parts of the country today. Hopefully that means we’re more aware – but it also puts us in danger of sanitizing what is and what was.”

— Lisa Wingate