Top 120 Susan Meissner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is the nature of the earth to shift. It is the nature of fragile things to break. It is the nature of fire to burn. And just as it is the nature of men and women to build, it is also in our nature to begin again after disaster. This I know, too.”

— Susan Meissner

2. “Love is not blind – it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.”

— Susan Meissner

3. “Sometimes the expectation is better than the fulfillment.”

— Susan Meissner

4. “Everything beautiful has a story it wants to tell. But not every story is beautiful.”

— Susan Meissner

5. “Home isn’t a safe place where everything stays the same; it’s a place where you are safe and loved despite nothing staying the same.”

— Susan Meissner

6. “I came through the crucible, and it did not reduce me to ashes. I survived.”

— Susan Meissner

7. “When people are thrown into an abyss and together find their way out of it, they are not the same people. They are bound to one.”

— Susan Meissner

8. “Think of England as a very large book. The Cotswolds would be an unfussy chapter in the middle somewhere where there is lots of limestone and even more sheep.”

— Susan Meissner

9. “The person who completes your life is not so much the person who shares all the years of your existence, but rather the person who made your life worth living, no matter how long or short a time you were given to spend with them.”

— Susan Meissner

10. “Control is an illusion. No one has it. I don’t even have it. You can’t wish for control; you can only learn to play your part in a world where nothing is truly certain. And you do have a part to play.”

— Susan Meissner

11. “Do not choose to abandon love because you are afraid that it will crush you. Love is the only true constant in a fragile world.”

— Susan Meissner

12. “Sometimes asking God for a reason for something is like asking Him why the sky is blue. There is a complex, scientific reason for it, Claire, but most children, including you, are content with knowing it is blue because it is. If we understood everything about everything, we would have no need for faith.”

— Susan Meissner

13. “Love is the only true constant in a fragile world.”

— Susan Meissner

14. “Fear is a heaviness you can’t wriggle out from under. You must simply find the will to stand with it and start walking. Fear does not start to fade until you take the step that you think you can’t take.”

— Susan Meissner

15. “It’s funny how just having an unobstructed view of the possible future can make you think you’re capable of achieving anything.”

— Susan Meissner

16. “You think you have a view of what’s waiting for you just up the road, but then something happens, and you find out pretty quick you were looking at the wrong road.”

— Susan Meissner

17. “If people don’t do their part to stop the spread of evil when they’re asked to, it just gets stronger and then no one can stop it.”

— Susan Meissner

18. “Sages of the past would say we are – all of us – just imperfect people on a flawed planet who are trying to hold on to what is good and lovely and right.”

— Susan Meissner

19. “We belong far less to where we’ve come from than where we want to go. – FRANZ WERFEL.”

— Susan Meissner

20. “Which was worse? Mourning the loss of something without knowing you never actually had it, or mourning the loss of what you thought you had and never had at all?”

— Susan Meissner

21. “Kindness is always motivated by something nobler than just a desire to be kind.”

— Susan Meissner

22. “If I had learned anything from this past year, it is that despair is love’s fiercest enemy.”

— Susan Meissner

23. “Poetry speaks slowly. My mother told me that. We are usually too much in a hurry.”

— Susan Meissner

24. “Fear is worse than pain, I think. Pain is centralized, identifiable, and wanes as you wait. Fear is a heaviness you can’t wriggle out from under. You must simply find the will to stand with it and start walking. Fear does not start to fade until you take the step that you think you can’t.”

— Susan Meissner

25. “We do not become different people as we age; we just add layers of experience onto who we already are.”

— Susan Meissner

26. “Truth is a strange companion. It devastates one moment and enthralls the next. But it never deceives. And because of that, in the end, it comforts.”

— Susan Meissner

27. “And what does war even accomplish? How does one country win over another by simply killing its people? None of it makes any sense.”

— Susan Meissner

28. “Life is real, in all its complexity. And though it can be painfully difficult, it can also be unspeakably wonderful.”

— Susan Meissner

29. “There is just the simple truth that you must forgive yourself for only being able to make your own choices, and no one else’s.”

— Susan Meissner

30. “People who say everything happens for a reason usually say that only when they agree with the reason.”

— Susan Meissner

31. “The American Protective League, of course. We keep an eye out for German sympathizers, slackers, shows of antipatriotism. That sort of thing. It’s important work.”

— Susan Meissner

32. “It is the nature of the earth to shift. It is the nature of fragile things to break. It is the nature of fire to burn.”

— Susan Meissner

33. “I want to learn how to look deep to see what people are really like. I want to be the kind of person who plunges past the surface and seeks to know the inner thoughts of the people I am around.”

— Susan Meissner

34. “Everything beautiful has a story it wants to tell.”

— Susan Meissner

35. “Everything beautiful has a story it wants to tell’” she said reading aloud the store’s tagline at the top of the form... “I love that.”

— Susan Meissner

36. “It should always make us happy to say that loving someone and being loved by someone is worth whatever price paid.”

— Susan Meissner

37. “Sooner or later she will learn time changes everything, takes everything: sometimes.”

— Susan Meissner

38. “I guess our eyes don’t change much from when we were young. Perhaps it’s just how we see things that changes.”

— Susan Meissner

39. “The heart always does what it needs to do.”

— Susan Meissner

40. “Yes. Strangely enough, war has a way of absolving us of the mistakes we make while in its dreadful shadow, but it keeps this absolution a secret. I didn’t realize I was playing my cards against a cruel opponent that had its own cards to play.”

— Susan Meissner

41. “I understood nothing really about love, only that it was the most devastating, most spectacular, most desirable force on earth. Love was both the softest edge and the sharpest edge of what made life real.”

— Susan Meissner

42. “You want to fix what hurts the moment it starts hurting, but this time you’re going to have to embrace the slowness of healing. You’ll never be able to live with this part of your story until you realize you must make peace with what happened to you and your part in it. And that takes time.”

— Susan Meissner

43. “He could not know that thoughts are not things you can give or not give. Thoughts are thrust upon you. You can only hope that thoughts that you don’t want will tire of you at some point and flutter away.”

— Susan Meissner

44. “It is much harder to pretend than it is to simply be who you already are.”

— Susan Meissner

45. “Thistle House is for people who love and care for one another. We respect one another in this house, Emmeline. We carry one another’s burdens. We weep for one another and we laugh with one another. We hold one another by the hand when the lights go out and when the way seems hopeless. We work together and we share the table together and we pray together. No matter how old we are or what we are called.”

— Susan Meissner

46. “What’s there to remember if not the good things?”

— Susan Meissner

47. “I used to think mercy meant showing kindness to someone who didn’t deserve it, as if only the recipient defined the act. The girl in between has learned that mercy is defined by its giver. Our flaws are obvious, yet we are loved and able to love, if we choose, because there is that bit of the divine still smoldering in us.”

— Susan Meissner

48. “People treat you differently when they think you are too young to know what you want.”

— Susan Meissner

49. “We are born knowing how to be just. And we die knowing we spent a lifetime pretending we didn’t.”

— Susan Meissner

50. “Love was both the softest edge and the sharpest edge of what made life real.”

— Susan Meissner