The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they're not pleasant things. That's living.
(~Edna Ferber, So Big)

Mothers were the same all through the centuries…a great sisterhood of love and service…the remembered and the unremembered alike. 
(~L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside)

“Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.” 
(~Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)

Monday is like a spelling test that your teacher has just passed out, and you haven’t had time yet to make any mistakes. It’s like a blank piece of art paper that you haven’t messed up. Monday is like the second after your teacher asks you a mental math question in front of the whole class–but you haven’t given the wrong answer. Yet. Any good thing can happen on a Monday! 
(~Sally Warner, Ellray Jakes is NOT a chicken!)

 “See,” said Hook in answer to Smee’s question, “that is a mother. What a lesson! The nest must have fallen into the water, but would the mother desert her eggs? No.” 
(~J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan)

“...now that I am a mother, I understand what Mother's Day is about: it's about looking through our lives and recognizing the act of mothering everywhere we see it, and more than that, recognizing that when any of us mother--when we listen, nurture, nourish, protect--we're doing sacred work.” 
(Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)

We do not have to have health restored in order to have hope. We do not have to cling desperately to life in this world when we see life in relationship to the world to come. This life is not all that there is. More awaits us, and prayer makes it possible for us to catch a glimpse of eternal life. Prayer becomes a means of grace that enables us to loosen our hold on time so we can put our hands on eternity. 
(~Steve Harper, Talking in the Dark)