bravery

...because I went to London on my own, and because I went to solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.

Bravery wasn__ in protecting myself from everything, it was in daring to trust, daring to love, daring to be me. Sometimes being brave meant letting go.

That__ the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they__e suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That__ why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells__e becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you__e gone a few weeks and haven__ felt that awful struggle of your childish self _ struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence _ you__l know you__e gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you__e gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn__ live boldly enough, that they didn__ invest enough heart, didn__ love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

Those who suffer suffer because hurt people hurt people, and busy people let it happen. So am I going to be busy or am I going to be brave?

The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.

Like a Columbus of the heart, mind and soul I have hurled myself off the shores of my own fears and limiting beliefs to venture far out into the uncharted territories of my inner truth, in search of what it means to be genuine and at peace with who I really am. I have abandoned the masquerade of living up to the expectations of others and explored the new horizons of what it means to be truly and completely me, in all my amazing imperfection and most splendid insecurity.

What is life but God's daring invitation to a remarkable journey? And what is human nature but a staunchly inbred tendency toward self-preservation? And because of the rigidly paradoxical nature of these things, the road of life is seldom trod beyond a few scant steps.

A conviction borne of God amply possesses the potency and power to brazenly reach beyond the possible in order to topple the impossible.

Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.

I have gotten where I am today by refusing to stay where I was. Change is something I have done over and over again.

Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room to grow.

If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.

An appeal to fear never finds an echo in German hearts.

Being brave and being alone aren't the same thing.

It is better to be alone than to become a person that loses his soul to the fear of loneliness.

It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on - that was his fate, his gift. But having thrown away, when he dismounted, all gestures and fripperies, all trophies of nuts and roses, and shrunk so that not only fame but even his own name was forgotten by him, he kept even in that desolation a vigilance which spared no phantom and luxuriated in no vision, and it was in this guise that he inspired in William Bankes (intermittently) and in Charles Tansley (obsequiously) and in his wife now, when she looked up and saw him standing at the edge of the lawn, profoundly, reverence, and pity, and gratitude too, as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boat-loads a feeling of gratitude for the duty it is taking upon itself of marking the channel out there in the floods alone.

But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least.

Leaving home's a cinch. It's the staying, once you've found it, that takes courage.