Quotes about Patience

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer.

Do you still believe that I am the Resurrection and the Life? Even when you don't get what you want? Even when nothing makes sense?

I was waiting for the kind of solution where God reaches down and touches you with his magic wand and all of a sudden I would be fixed, like a broken toaster oven. But this was not the way it happened. Instead, I got one angstrom unit better, day by day.

It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools—friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty—and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they're enough.

God gives us Her own self. Left to my own devices, I would prefer answers. This is why it is good that I am in charge of so little: the pets, the shopping, the garden.

Her message was always the same: God loved the world, all evidence to the contrary, and we must not give up on God.

They taught me that maturity was the ability to live with unresolved problems.

I tried to cooperate with grace, which is to say, I did not turn on the TV.

Even though you know that your manuscript is not perfect and you'd hoped for so much more, but if you also know that there is simply no more steam in the pressure cooker and that it's the very best you can do for now—well? I think this means that you are done.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. I

All good teachers know that inside a remote or angry person is a soul, way deep down, capable of a full human life--a person with hope of a better story, who has allies, and can read... To me, teaching is a holy calling, especially with students less likely to succeed. It's the gift not only of not giving up on people, but of even figuring out where to begin.

You unconscious can't work when youare breathing down it's neck. You'll sit there going, Are you done in there yet? Are you done in there yet?. But it is trying to tell you nicely, Shut up and go away.