God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world

God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure 9 will go in the ditch and you have only one to battle with.

Life will not always be so hard or cruel. Our difficulties are but a moment.

Plan for the very worst, then pray for the very best. Savor the days when the sun shines, but have your raincoat and boots ready for the storms that will always blow in from the bay.

Stories teach us to not give up hope because there are times in our own journey when we mustn't give up hope. They teach endurance because in our lives we are meant to endure. They carry messages that are older than the words themselves, messages that reach beyond the page.

To find purpose in our problems, to see past the ugliness, rather than step back, we should get closer. Only then will we notice the beauty.

Our trials, our troubles, our demons, our angels—we reenact them because these stories explain our lives. Literature's lessons repeat because they echo from deeper places.