story group anxiety

I start my story group tonight and I’m a ball of nerves. But while reading the book the group is based on I keep finding these quotes in the margins, which I will be sharing with you whether you like it or not.

Did you ever think, child…how much piecing a quilt’s like living a life?... You see, you start out with just so much calico; you don’t go to the store and pick it out and buy it, but the neighbors will give you a piece here and a piece there, and you’ll have a piece left every time you cut out a dress, and you take just what happens to come. And that’s like predestination. But when it comes to the cutting out, why, you’re free to choose your own pattern. You can give the same kind of pieces to two persons, and one’ll make a “nine-patch” and one’ll make a “wild-goose chase” and there’ll be two quilts made out of the same kind of pieces, and just as different as they can be. And that is just the way with living. The Lord sends us the pieces, but we can cut them out and put them together pretty much to suit ourselves, and there’s a heap more in the cutting out and sewing than there is in the calico. –Eliza Calbert Hall, Aunt Jane of Kentucky

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day…. Today we live, but by tomorrow today will be a story. The whole world, all human life, is one long story. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, and Other Stories

Time’s covetousness is forever. Time devours and devours – and gives back nothing. How terrible to face death without ever having claimed freedom, even in all its danger! –Frederick Nietzsche, in Irvin Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

What is to give light must endure burning. –Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. –Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Love slays what we have been that we may be what we were not. –St. Augustine

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life? –Mary Oliver The Summer Day