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1 " I wondered what my father had looked like that day, how he had felt, marrying the lively and beautiful girl who was my mother. I wondered what his life was like now. Did he ever think of us? I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't; I didn't know him well enough. Instead, I wondered about him occasionally, with a confused kind of longing. There was a place inside me carved out for him; I didn't want it to be there, but it was. Once, at the hardware store, Brooks had shown me how to use a drill. I'd made a tiny hole that went deep. The place for my father was like that. "
― Elizabeth Berg , We Are All Welcome Here
2 " We're all trapped in a body with limitations, even the most able-bodied among us! And we're all guided by minds with limitations of their own. You want to know my philosophy? It's this: Our job, regardless of our bodily circumstances is to rise above what holds us down, and to help others do the same. "
3 " I could still taste and smell and hear and see,” she said. “I could still learn and I could still teach. I could still love and be loved. I had my mind and my spirit. And I had you. "
4 " Because my mother is a third base. "
5 " knew it in my brain, anyway; but I was nonetheless reminded of it in my heart in these unexpected and most random of ways. I can only describe it as the way you touch something bare-handed that you just took from the oven. Impossible as it seems, every now and "
6 " But for the outstanding fact of polio, my mother was remarkably healthy; "
7 " Life was curiously exhausting but also exhilarating. "
8 " Though she could do nothing but stare at me, I feared her, mightily and distinctly. If she had told me to slap my own face, I would have. “Now go to bed,” my mother said, and I did. "
9 " Sometimes Suralee and I walked up to the cemetery and lay on the graves. We liked to pretend we were letting dead people speak through us. “I was a hardworking man with a talent for whittling,” Suralee might say from her "
10 " That’s the Jesus truth. It’s a wide, wide world. Sooner you lift up your gaze from your own self, sooner you know that. "