Top 160 Lisa Wingate Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “We’ve tried to set her straight, but you don’t set that woman anywhere. She’s like the value of pi. She just is.”

— Lisa Wingate

103. “I’m trying to impress upon my students that everyone has a history. Just because we’re not always happy with what’s true doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know it. It’s how we learn. It’s how we do better in the future. Hopefully, anyway.”

— Lisa Wingate

104. “Maybe grace was all around me, bubbling through, passing under my feet, and I’d never seen it because I’d never tried to see.”

— Lisa Wingate

105. “Well, you know how a river moves a mountain.” The words surprised me at first, but I knew where they were coming from. “Stone by stone,” she finished.”

— Lisa Wingate

106. “I ponder how we can put a man on the moon, fly shuttles back and forth to outer space, send probes to Mars, and yet we can’t traverse the boundaries in the human heart, fix what’s wrong. How can things still be this way?”

— Lisa Wingate

107. “To love and be loved is the very thing our souls scream for from birth and every moment after, the urge to need and be needed as natural as breathing, as life-giving as breath.”

— Lisa Wingate

108. “They showed me what a stable life could look like. If they hadn’t bothered, how would I have even known there was another way to live? You can’t aspire to something you’ve never seen.”

— Lisa Wingate

109. “Not appreciating the noise until she was surrounded by silence.”

— Lisa Wingate

110. “All things pass, suga’ pea. All the things a this worl’ got a time for bornin’ and time for dyin’, and a time for troublin’ and a time for restin’. Ssshhh.”

— Lisa Wingate

111. “Except God don’t create accidents. We only think there are accidents because we don’t know what God has in mind.”

— Lisa Wingate

112. “Secrets ain’t a healthy thang, no matter how old they is. Sometimes the oldest secrets is the worst of all.”

— Lisa Wingate

113. “It’s funny how family histories seem to differ, depending on whom you ask.”

— Lisa Wingate

114. “Huh.” On occasion that’s all I can say to the facts we’ve uncovered during our journey through the Underground project. The truth is frequently horrific. “The things we find in history are hard to understand sometimes.”

— Lisa Wingate

115. “We all have scars.”

— Lisa Wingate

116. “She bear-hugged me in a way that performed some sort of chiropractic miracle, because when she set me down, the tightness in my back was gone and I was an inch taller.”

— Lisa Wingate

117. “No matter who else passed through my life, no one would take the place of my brother. He would always be the only one with whom I shared the quiet beginnings of life, the awkwardness of growing up, the secret hiding places of childhood, the early hours of Christmas mornings waiting for Santa Claus, the arguments over space in the backseat of a car, the walk to school on the first day, and the rough times after things didn’t go so well.”

— Lisa Wingate

118. “Everything I wanted my life to be, it won’t be now. The path that brought me here is flooded over.”

— Lisa Wingate

119. “Most of the time when we got a tough row to plow, the Good Lord makes us fall a little short and puts another mule in the pasture. You don’t never know whether you’re the blind mule or the deaf mule, but you’re always one or the other.”

— Lisa Wingate

120. “Together, we travel the living river. We turn our faces to the sunlight and fly time and time again home to Kingdom Arcadia.”

— Lisa Wingate

121. “Dying is a hard thing to get done, sometimes.”

— Lisa Wingate

122. “I want a pain I understand instead of the one I don’t.”

— Lisa Wingate

123. “I am momentarily struck silent. Clean that junk out? What kind of a Neanderthal talks about books that way?”

— Lisa Wingate

124. “The wounds we cause, while unintentional, still bleed.”

— Lisa Wingate

125. “There are no right or wrong answers. Not when it comes to literature.”

— Lisa Wingate

126. “Our schedules are always filled with other things.”

— Lisa Wingate

127. “If you wait until you can foresee everything, you’ll never launch.”

— Lisa Wingate

128. “Things could be worse is wearing thin. I’m exhausted. I’m confused. I am effectively talking to the air.”

— Lisa Wingate

129. “A person must have principles, Epiphany. That’s the one thing no one can take from you. The only way you can lose your principles is to give them up. Remember that.”

— Lisa Wingate

130. “Joy, I realized, isn’t so much a circumstance you find yourself in but a choice you make.”

— Lisa Wingate

131. “Sad thing when stories die for the lack of listenin’ ears.”

— Lisa Wingate

132. “The train scoots along in a slow, lazy sway, like a mama rocking her baby, too lost in the look of her child to think of the day’s work done or the hard row ahead.”

— Lisa Wingate

133. “It’s funny how what you’re used to seems like it’s right even if it’s bad.”

— Lisa Wingate

134. “It’s strange how you can feel guilty for a family history you didn’t have anything to do with, isn’t it?”

— Lisa Wingate

135. “Every available avenue is paved with guilt, lined with pain, and pockmarked with shame.”

— Lisa Wingate

136. “I have written all of them’ She shows me her work, while I look down in wonder. ‘These pages, by the beginning letter of the surname.’ She turns to a page with R, which is a letter I know, there at the top, she reads off, ‘Amalee August Rain.’ I sit down beside her and she gives it over to me, an I turn through all the pages. ‘I’ll be,’ I whisper. ‘A book of lost friends.”

— Lisa Wingate

137. “Tough times make good people and bad people.”

— Lisa Wingate

138. “The most important endeavors require a risk.”

— Lisa Wingate

139. “I leaf through more pages, wondering, remembering, thinking about this watershed year. Life can turn on a dime. The appointment book reinforces my new awareness of this. We plan our days, but we don’t control them.”

— Lisa Wingate

140. “When you’re a kid in a tough family situation, you’re painfully vulnerable to trying to fill the void with peers.”

— Lisa Wingate

141. “Grief and a change of location can often be more than the mind and body can handle.”

— Lisa Wingate

142. “And if you haven’t got a single book, the idea of putting your hand on one is like Christmas and a birthday rolled up together.”

— Lisa Wingate

143. “As if I didn’t know that already. A courtroom isn’t much different. Female lawyers are always on trial in more ways than one. We have to play by different rules.”

— Lisa Wingate

144. “My life was like that box. The best things in all the imperfections.”

— Lisa Wingate

145. “Arney brought me back so I could go forward.”

— Lisa Wingate

146. “I understood that feeling of regret, the sense that there was a moment when the paths divided and you chose one over the other.”

— Lisa Wingate

147. “Sometimes life moves so fast, the road splits in an instant, and you only have a heartbeat to decide which way to turn.”

— Lisa Wingate

148. “We’re always trying to persuade ourselves of things.”

— Lisa Wingate

149. “Life never is just about what you want. Seldom ever.”

— Lisa Wingate

150. “Every living creature needs to hear the beating of another heart once in a while.” Her words were quiet, almost as if she were only thinking them, not speaking at all. “Nothing God made on this earth is meant to go on its way alone.”

— Lisa Wingate