Top 180 Shauna Niequist Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Which brings us, literally, to the heart of the conversation: the heart, the cavernous ache. Am I loved? Does someone see me? Do I matter? Am I safe?”

— Shauna Niequist

152. “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

153. “I became the person people don’t want to tell they’re pregnant. I hate that. A friend told me her happy, fantastic news, and just a second later she burst out crying, afraid for how this would make me feel. I hate that. I work really hard to arrange my face in such a way that approximates uncomplicated glee. And I am happy for them, or course. But sometimes just after the happiness is the desperation. Some days are easier than others.”

— Shauna Niequist

154. “And also that God’s will has a lot more to do with inviting us to become more than we previously have been than about getting us to one very specific destination. God’s will, should we choose to engage in it, will generally feel like surgery, rooting out all the darkness and fear we’ve come to live with.”

— Shauna Niequist

155. “I needed a piece of a story, something real and full of life and blood and breath and heartache, something that someone had lived through, a piece of wisdom earned the hard way. That’s why telling our stories is so important.”

— Shauna Niequist

156. “Hospitality is holding space for another person to be seen and heard and loved. It’s giving someone a place to be when they’d otherwise be alone. It’s, as my friend Sibyl says, when someone leaves your home feeling better about themselves, not better about you.”

— Shauna Niequist

157. “Part of the crazy of it is that we don’t allow people to fall apart unless they’re massively successful. You can’t be just a normal lady with a normal job and burn yourself out – that’s only for bigshot people. And so the normal, exhausted, soul-starved people keep going, because we’re not special enough to burn out.”

— Shauna Niequist

158. “I needed to know who should get the best of my energy: my boys or a company that asked me to speak for them. I needed to know what matters. And the image of that man in his tuxedo was all I needed. You will always regret something. You will always disappoint someone. But it isn’t going to be my husband and our boys. It has been, sometimes. But I’m learning. And I’m making things right.”

— Shauna Niequist

159. “I’m learning, though, that the God who loves me isn’t just looking for apologies and report cards. He wants me to bring the vinegar so that I can taste the oil. He has all the time in the world to sit with me and sift through my fears and feelings and failings. That’s what prayer is. That’s what love is.”

— Shauna Niequist

160. “Please keep making art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable.”

— Shauna Niequist

161. “I have a truly manic commitment to leftovers. I’ll eat the same thing eight meals in a row, just so it doesn’t go to waste.”

— Shauna Niequist

162. “God is present to me, possibly more so than ever because of my desperation, and the world he made nourishes me with its beauty and hope as much as it ever has. I believe still today what I have always believed: that God is good, that the world he made is extraordinary, and that his comfort is like nothing else on earth.”

— Shauna Niequist

163. “I believe in mining through the darkest seasons in our lives and choosing to believe that we’ll find something important every time.”

— Shauna Niequist

164. “Be very careful that you are not giving yourself to a pale imitation of life with Christ – life about Christ, or life generally near to Christ.”

— Shauna Niequist

165. “We dive into information or work or bicycling or whatever, because it feels good to be good at something, to master something, to control something when marriage and intimacy often feel profoundly out of our control. And so, little by little, we tiptoe away. And before we know it, there’s a cavern between us, easily filled by someone simpler, better suited to us, someone, honestly, who hasn’t had to put up with us for quite so long, someone who still laughs at our jokes.”

— Shauna Niequist

166. “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

167. “Each of us has been created by a holy God with love, on purpose and for a purpose. But so many of us feel afraid or unprepared. This is the secret, though: No one is prepared enough. No one is perfectly ready.”

— Shauna Niequist

168. “Pleasing is such a fraught and freighted word, it seems, saccharine and over-sweet. Let’s do so much more than simply please people. Let’s see them and love them and delight them, look deeply into their eyes. Pleasing is shallow and temporary joy, not nearly as valuable or rich as seeing or connection or listening. Pleasing feels like corn syrup, like cheap candy, while pleasure is homemade pie, rich with butter, thick with sugar and ripe fruit.”

— Shauna Niequist

169. “If anger is active and powerful, grief and sadness are tender, vulnerable. Anger puts us back in the power position, while grief lays us bare, like letting ourselves lie down on a sidewalk, knowing we could get stepped on, crushed. Grief gives up the pretense of control.”

— Shauna Niequist

170. “What God does in the tiny corners of our day-to-day lives is stunning and gorgeous and headline-making, but we have a bad habit of saving the headlines for the grotesque and scary.”

— Shauna Niequist

171. “Great art says the things we wished someone would say out loud, the things we wish we could say out loud.”

— Shauna Niequist

172. “But our goal, remember, is to feed around our table the people we love. We’re not chefs or restaurateurs or culinary school graduates, and we shouldn’t try to be. Make it the way the people you love want to eat it.”

— Shauna Niequist

173. “Sometimes it helps to get outside our problems and stick our fingers into someone else’s problems for a while.”

— Shauna Niequist

174. “I’m learning to choose myself instead of giving the best of myself to people and relationships and institutions. Loyalty to myself. Belonging to myself. Looking for joy just for myself. I need a disproportionate amount of care right now, and the one who is responsible for that care is me. I can’t assume that someone else will do it; it’s my responsibility to create a rhythm for my life that nurtures me, that brings me joy, that allows me to flourish, even given the weight of things I’m carrying.”

— Shauna Niequist

175. “You don’t have to damage your body and your soul and the people you love most in order to get done what you think you have to get done. You don’t have to live like this.”

— Shauna Niequist

176. “I’ve been seeing worried parents for decades now. Parents worry, and kids are mostly fine. Just do this one thing: Be enchanted by whatever’s currently enchanting your child.”

— Shauna Niequist

177. “The ache for perfection keeps us isolated and exhausted – we keep people at arm’s length, if that, and we keep hustling, trying trying trying to reach some sort of ideal that never comes.”

— Shauna Niequist

178. “Self-compassion is letting yourself off the hook, letting yourself be human and flawed and also amazing. It’s giving yourself credit for showing up instead of beating yourself up for taking so long to get there.”

— Shauna Niequist

179. “Maybe walking is the speed of the soul, the exact right pacing for our bodies and spirits and hearts and minds to reconnect, to dwell together again.”

— Shauna Niequist

180. “We’re responsible to help create a world that values questions more than answers, that celebrates learning and not just knowing, that sees failure as a part of the process of success.”

— Shauna Niequist

181. “I know now that I’m strong enough, brave enough, whole enough to hold it all – how it was and how it ended. What I got wrong, what I made right, who I was, who I wasn’t, who I’ve yet to become. What I miss, what was lost, what’s still unfolding. I’m not perfect or shiny or bulletproof. The story of my life is not a fairy tale. It’s not a horror story. It’s just a story like most stories – dark and light and beautiful and terrible and still being written.”

— Shauna Niequist

182. “It’s easy, of course, to buzz the beach and find the sparkle on good days – days when the sun is shining and your heart is light. When it gets really dark, though, that’s when you start to understand that it’s a discipline, and you need it in the dark so much more desperately than you need it in the light. Joy and celebration are practices for the long haul.”

— Shauna Niequist

183. “For a long time, I wanted people to change – to be less cruel, to be decent, to be fair, to tell the truth. That would be lovely. But I’m not waiting around for that. I’m deciding who gets to enter my spaces, my heart, my mind, my living room, because I’m responsible for those places, no one else. I’m responsible to protect my mind, my heart, my family.”

— Shauna Niequist

184. “I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away.”

— Shauna Niequist

185. “What does it mean to show up as deeply myself right now? What does it mean to give my whole self to my community instead of only the parts that feel acceptable and easy?”

— Shauna Niequist

186. “And I know now that I can trust myself, that I can belong to myself, that belonging to something larger than myself is lovely but isn’t for every season. It’s a little lonelier out here, a little rockier. I’m learning to make myself a home in the wilderness, in the unbelonging itself.”

— Shauna Niequist

187. “If you think you’re too old to make a difference, you’re not. If you think you don’t have enough time left to build something really beautiful, you’re wrong. If you think your legacy-leaving window has closed, it hasn’t.”

— Shauna Niequist