“The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt…He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return.”

“The dead do not hurt you; only the living do.”

“A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?”

“The cruelest thing you can do to a person who’s living in panic is to offer him or her hope that turns out false. When the crash comes its intolerable.”

“The Motto of Champions: If you are hurt, you can suck it up and press on. If injured, you can rebound and return bigger and better…and continue to inspire!”

“a flower knows, when its butterfly will return, and if the moon walks out, the sky will understand;but now it hurts, to watch you leave so soon,when I don’t know, if you will ever come back.”

“My pride shut me up, my hurt shut me down, and together they ganged up on my hope and let her get away.”

“There will always be someone willing to hurt you, put you down, gossip about you, belittle your accomplishments and judge your soul. It is a fact that we all must face. However, if you realize that God is a best friend that stands beside you when others cast stones you will never be afraid, never feel worthless and never feel alone.”

“You’ll stop hurting when you stop hoping.”

“I never did mind my birthday. Adding up the years made me fearless the true killer of my life was always Valentines Day.”

“Sometimes things are so bad, the only way to keep happy is to avoid them altogether.”

“Being deemed a fool, even if it is done by a fool, does not hurt, unless you are a fool.”

“Healing old hurts can only begin when the children we once were feel safe enough to speak their hearts to the adults we are now.”

“The only way to heal from the pain of the past is to walk through that pain in the present. It’s terrifying, I know. It feels safer to just let the pain continue to smolder in the darkest parts of yourself. But the dark parts need tending, too, my friend. Don’t be afraid to breathe life back into those embers of old pain, to rekindle the fires of unhealed hurts. The flames aren’t there to burn you. They are there to light your way through pain to healing. You can walk through courageous and confident or shaking in your boots. It doesn’t matter. Just walk through it. Hurt will transform into hope, wounds into wisdom, suffering into scars that tell of battles won and lost and of a human who survived it all.”

“Forgiveness isn’t telling someone it was okay to hurt you. It’s telling yourself it’s okay to stop hurting. It doesn’t mean you have to trust them again. It means you can learn to trust yourself again. It doesn’t mean you have to give them a free pass back into your life. It means you are free to take your life back again. Forgiveness is simply emptying your past of its power to empty your present of its peace.”