This life and this job and this position that I'm put in, it forces you to grow up quick. I definitely got dropped in the deep end.

I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way.

You've been a good steward of it. You've been a good steward of your pain.

Broken things are precious. We eat broken bread because we share in the depth of our Lord and His broken life. Broken flowers give perfume. Broken incense is used in adoration. A broken ship saved Paul and many other passengers on their way to Rome. Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.

Learning comes from books; penetration of a mystery from suffering.

We give up our time, and get His eternity; we give up our sin, and receive His grace; we give up petty loves, and receive the Flame of Love.

In His own case, now as always, the most sorrowful moods pass into the most blissful; there is never the Cross without the Resurrection; the 'Hour' in which evil has mastery passes quickly into the 'Day' where God is Victor.

Character is to some extent judged by what a man does with his falls. A pig falls into the mud and stays there; a sheep falls in and climbs out.

In spite of discouragement and adversity, those who are happiest seem to have a way of learning from difficult times, becoming stronger, wiser and happier as a result.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

The things hardest to bear are sweetest to remember.

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.