William P. Young quotes: insight from the Canadian novelist.
“Dreams are sometimes important, you know. They can be a way of openin’ up the window and lettin’ the bad air out.”
“It’s not the work, but the purpose that makes it special.”
“Growth means change and change involves risk, stepping from the known to the unknown.”
“It is remarkable how a seemingly insignificant action or event can change entire lives.”
“You have to take the time to prepare the soil if you want to embrace the seed.”
“Responsibilities and expectations are the basis of guilt and shame and judgement, and they provide the essential framework that promotes performance as the basis for identity and value.”
“Roads are rarely what they appear to be and are not predictable. Maybe safe is about the company you keep and not about the road you take.”
“Life takes a bit of time and a lot of relationship.”
“It is so easy to get sucked into the if-only game, and playing it is a short and slippery slide into despair.”
“Mistakes are a part of life.”
“Today’s minor irritations may become tomorrow’s treasured memories. We often don’t know what we are missing, until it’s missing.”
“Transformation without work and pain, without suffering, without a sense of loss is just an illusion of true change.”
“Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception—what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms—what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn’t make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.”
“Image and appearance tell you little. The inside is bigger than the outside when you have the eyes to see.”
“Disconnect your identity from what you produce, and that’s a hard thing for us because we think of our significance, worth and value based on what we do instead of who we are.”
“Authority, as you usually think of it, is merely the excuse the strong use to make others conform to what they want.”
“I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into.”
“I’m an accidental writer.”
“I make a distinction between true and real. I think that the story is true, it’s just not real. That’s what a parable is. It takes things that we all know are real, and it takes life events that actually happen, and it weaves them into a fiction that allows truth to actually be embedded.”
“I had no plans to write a book. My wife asked me, as a gift to our six children, to write down the lessons on spirituality and life I had come to believe in so strongly—lessons that were very different from the ones I had learned from my rigid missionary parents or while I was studying theology. My wife said, ‘Put in one place how you think, because you think outside the box and it’s really wonderful.’ I wanted to do a story because story has a way of communicating with the heart. I’m not thinking anybody else is gonna read this. So I can do whatever I want, try and communicate the things that are most intensely real and precious to me.”
“Money from the book sales means I no longer have to work three jobs to make ends meet. But the financial rewards mean less to me than the joy and insights many readers say my book, The Shack, has given them. What this book has given me is an ability to look from the outside into thousands of people’s lives; people who are so hungry for authenticity of relationship that this book just blows open their hearts. All of a sudden I’m finding myself in a place with a platform that I never prayed for or asked for or thought about. And I’m comfortable because I didn’t put me here. Every bit of this is the grace and the affection of God.”
“The Shack is a metaphor. It’s my soul. It’s where you store all your addictions, all your secrets in this house of shame. It’s everything you don’t want anybody else to know exists. And it’s held together by lies. I had a thin veneer of perfectionism and performance covering up an ocean of shame.”
“It wasn’t long ago I was cleaning toilets and now I have protestors. How cool is this?”
“The soul is healed by being with children.”
“Why do children love to hide and seek? Ask any person who has a passion to explore and discover and create. The choice to hide so many wonders from you is an act of love that is a gift inside the process of life.”
“You can kiss your family and friends goodbye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”
“Judgment is not about destruction, but about setting things right.”
“Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved.”
“You are free to love without an agenda.”
“So many believe that it is love that grows, but it is the knowing that grows and love simply expands to contain it.”
“Faith takes risk and there is always risk in relationships, but bottom line? The world has no meaning apart from relationships. Some are just messier than others, some are seasonal, others are difficult, and a few are easy, but every one of them is important.”
“Forgiveness does not create a relationship. Unless people speak the truth about what they have done and change their mind and behavior, a relationship of trust is not possible. When you forgive someone you certainly release them from judgment, but without true change, no real relationship can be established.”
“Forgiveness does not establish relationship. It is to release you from something that will eat you alive, that will destroy your joy and your ability to love fully and openly.”
“Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person’s throat.”
“Forgiveness in no way requires that you trust the one you forgive.”
“Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly.”
“Don’t forget that in the midst of all your pain and heartache, you are surrounded by beauty, the wonder of creation, art, your music and culture, the sounds of laughter and love, of whispered hopes and celebrations, of new life and transformation, of reconciliation and forgiveness.”
“Emotions talked to you before you had words, so listen to them. They are often more honest than the mind’s remarkable ability to self-deceive.”
“Emotions are the colors of the soul; they are spectacular and incredible. When you don’t feel, the world becomes dull and colorless.”
“Don’t ever discount the wonder of your tears. They can be healing waters and a stream of joy. Sometimes they are the best words the heart can speak.”
“By choosing to declare what’s good and evil, you seek to determine your own destiny.”
“If anything matters then everything matters. Because you are important, everything you do is important. Every time you forgive, the universe changes; every time you reach out and touch a heart or a life, the world changes; with every kindness and service, seen or unseen, my purposes are accomplished and nothing will be the same again.”
Related: Stephen King quotes.
