Top 120 Susan Meissner Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “People treat you differently when they think you are too young to know what you want.”

— Susan Meissner

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

— Susan Meissner

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

— Susan Meissner

54. “To love is not to be fragile; it is to be unlocked and open. And when something is open, other things can come in.”

— Susan Meissner

55. “But heaven seems a place where truth cannot hurt. Here, the truth can be devastating.”

— Susan Meissner

56. “My choices that terrible morning had been prompted by love. What others had chosen had been prompted by hate. The effects of our choices had spilled onto each other. They always did.”

— Susan Meissner

57. “Ah, but what is history? Is it a record of what happened or rather our interpretation of what happened?” “I think it’s both,” I answer. “It has to be both. What good is remembering an event if you don’t remember how it made you feel. How it impacted others. How it made them feel. You would learn nothing and neither would anyone else.”

— Susan Meissner

58. “I want you to know that love is not a person. It is not of this earth at all. It wasn’t until now that I realized I had mistakenly come to believe that love came from a place inside me and therefore had to protect that place. It comes from heaven, Eleanor. It is given to us not to hold on to or hide from, but to give away.”

— Susan Meissner

59. “You don’t realize how small your world is when you are a child. Your parents are your east and west, your sun and moon.”

— Susan Meissner

60. “The main reason I have come here is to shuffle Death back to the place where it belong. That won’t happen if I don’t get to tangle with it.”

— Susan Meissner

61. “There were a thousand words for dreams realized and only one common whimper for hopes interrupted.”

— Susan Meissner

62. “When you only do what is expected of you, you never learn what you would’ve done had you chosen for yourself.”

— Susan Meissner

63. “Sooner or later she will learn time changes everything, takes everything: sometimes in a blink, and sometimes so slowly you can’t even see it happening.”

— Susan Meissner

64. “You shouldn’t imagine things that you haven’t a shred of proof happened...”

— Susan Meissner

65. “I no longer fear Death, though I know that I should. I’m strangely at peace with what I used to think of as my enemy. Living seems more the taskmaster of the two, doesn’t it? Life is wonderful and beautiful but oh, how hard it can be. Dying, by contrast, is easy and simple, almost gentle. But who can I tell such a thing to? No one. I am troubled by how remarkable this feeling is.”

— Susan Meissner

66. “We understand what we want to understand.”

— Susan Meissner

67. “This is how it is for all of us. Life will send us across a bridge we did not want to cross, but when we finally open our eyes on the other side, we see that there had been nothing to fear at all.”

— Susan Meissner

68. “Fear is not only a leaden foe, but a liar as well. It was not as bad as I thought it would be, sitting there in a London department store on an ordinary Saturday.”

— Susan Meissner

69. “Which one of them would make you the most sad if you had to live your life without him?”

— Susan Meissner

70. “Life is wonderful and beautiful but oh, how hard it can be.”

— Susan Meissner

71. “Sometimes what you want is given to you in a way that is so very different from how you had pictured getting it.”

— Susan Meissner

72. “Oh, but it’s our tears that make us human, Isabel.”

— Susan Meissner

73. “School gave me wings to leave rural Pennsylvania for Philadelphia, and my diploma gave me wings to Manhattan.”

— Susan Meissner

74. “It was only after time had passed that a person was able to see whether she might have been able to bear the load she was sure had been too heavy.”

— Susan Meissner

75. “For a moment, there was no age difference between the two of them, no crossed purposes, no opposing forces. They were just two women trying to chisel a happy life out of giant hulk of rough-edged circumstances.”

— Susan Meissner

76. “Music is the language of the soul. Music captures our prayers and hopes and joys – and yes, our sorrows – and gives them voice, just as the paintings and the statues give them dimension.”

— Susan Meissner

77. “He’s more than just the baby she found all those years ago. He’s the proof that out of a great pile of ashes you can still find something that the fire didn’t take.”

— Susan Meissner

78. “Please don’t let the unhappiness you knew in the past keep you from accepting happiness now.”

— Susan Meissner

79. “I am saying, when you make a choice, even if it’s a bad one, you’ve played your hand. You cannot live your life as though you still held all your cards.”

— Susan Meissner

80. “But life is lived at the moment you are living it, she thought. No one but God in heaven has the benefit of seeing beyond today.”

— Susan Meissner

81. “Change always happens... We adjust to it. Somehow we figure out a way. We straighten what we can or learn how to like something a little crooked. That’s how it is. Something breaks, you fix it as best you can. There’s always a way to make something better, even if it means sweeping up the broken pieces and starting all over. That’s how we keep moving, keep breathing, keep opening our eyes every morning, even when the only thing we know for sure is that we’re still alive.”

— Susan Meissner

82. “I am not such a significant creature in God’s universe that it is my decisions alone that can change the destiny of another.”

— Susan Meissner

83. “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.”

— Susan Meissner

84. “Everyone has a past, and everyone’s past matters.”

— Susan Meissner

85. “We decide who and what we will love and who and what we will hate. We decide what we will do with the love and hate. Every day we decide. It was this that revealed who we were, not the color of our flesh or the shape of our eyes or the language we spoke.”

— Susan Meissner

86. “She wanted to wake up in the arms of the angels and have them tell her she was worthy of love – to give it and to have it given to her.”

— Susan Meissner

87. “We only see a little bit of our stories at a time, and the hard parts remind us too harshly that we’re fragile and flawed. But it isn’t all hard. Your story isn’t all hard parts. Some of it is incredibly beautiful.”

— Susan Meissner

88. “Remembering what you want about the past, even if it’s not entirely true, keeps you from giving up on the present.”

— Susan Meissner

89. “I want to be walking down this street with Mama, headed where we’re headed. But her hand in mine makes me feel like I’m not alone in this world where you can’t always see what’s in front of you.”

— Susan Meissner

90. “Terrible things can happen to you that leave you unable to risk trusting the world with what you love; I know this better than anyone.”

— Susan Meissner

91. “It’s as if the body is a candle and the soul is its flame. When the flame is snuffed out, all that is left to prove that there had been a flame is the candle, and even that we only have for a little while. Even the candle is not ours to keep. And yet how we care for that candle for that stretch of time that it is still ours! How we want to remember the shape and fragrance of the little flame it held.”

— Susan Meissner

92. “Shut your eyes to the world of pain, and you also shut your eyes to the world of delight.”

— Susan Meissner

93. “The words fell out of my mouth like slivers of shattered glass.”

— Susan Meissner

94. “I think this is the danger we face whenever time passes and those who have suffered recover from what flattened them. The generation coming up behind might underestimate or miss completely all that the older generation survived. Q.”

— Susan Meissner

95. “It is this day you are living right now, this very day, that is yours to make of it what you will. So make it beautiful, if you can.”

— Susan Meissner

96. “When you are hungry for something, you often do not use your best judgment.”

— Susan Meissner

97. “People will always distrust what they don’t understand. And what they distrust, they cannot.”

— Susan Meissner

98. “Don’t borrow tomorrow’s burdens, my gram used to say.”

— Susan Meissner

99. “I smiled at this because some days I feel as though I’ve already lived several lifetimes and others as though I haven’t lived any kind of life at all, that I’m still waiting for it to start. Or waiting for it to start over.”

— Susan Meissner

100. “Deviance is woven into the fabric of a person’s genes, as is intelligence and moral fortitude. I would ask you how.”

— Susan Meissner