The Eighth Page Quotes

“Life is something like innumerable layers, leaving us wrongly assuming that the first or even the second layer is the essence of the thing.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Life is full of running. The key to a life lived or an existence tolerated is held in the single decision as to the direction in which we will run.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Sometimes life puts us in places that we had never could have envisioned even in our most inventive moments. And when we arrive in those unexpected places, we have to squint through the windows of our souls and wipe clean the eyes of our hearts, for in our blinding routines and mediocre plots we had not anticipated the need of doing so.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“If we wish to identify the truly great things in life, we can identify them by the fact that no matter how much we are exposed to them or how often we’re privileged to engage them, they remain great despite what our perception of them might do to them.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“There are those critical crossroads when we find ourselves standing facing certain surrender only being certain that we must refuse such a surrender.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Sometimes life abruptly opens up in ways so vast that it engulfs all of our constructs and theories and beliefs in the swiftness of that single moment. At times such as these, life does nothing less than demand a brutally exacting reconstruction of everything that we’ve expended the raw essence of our lives constructing.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“If we stand for nothing we will likely become nothing and subsequently achieve nothing, for nothing can only breed more of itself.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Some things will always and forever defy the denial that we take up to slay them.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Indeed, there is a deep melding of our humanity around a shared experience, and in that melding we find profound comfort knowing that we are not alone in the experience of it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Men will always be at battle,” the little girl said with an uncanny maturity. With her stride unbroken, she continued “Whether that battle is on a battlefield like this one, or on the most difficult battlefield of the heart and mind. It really doesn’t matter all that much, men will battle.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Yes, there are times when the world turns upside down, logic becomes subject to the muse of reckless interpretation, truth becomes the bed-child of selfish goals, and people are off on a wild course that bludgeons everyone they once loved or anyone who gets in the way of what they now purport to love.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“It is foolishness to think that you can leave a place your heart never left.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Any road not informed by the past will certainly be an uncertain one.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Sometimes things call out to us and we know them with total certainty. Yet, the certainty eludes us and we’re left with the angst of the unknown regarding something that, in fact, we know.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Sometimes it seems that a photo is anything but still. Sometimes photos seem to have a voice; to be alive in the stillness of their own image.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“At times, life vast beyond our understanding careens and then collides headlong with the scrawny limitations of our understanding in an all-out brawl that will dictate whether we stay stunted or whether we rise liberated.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“It is true that when we seek great things we most often never find them, for we have created a sense of what great things look like, what the nature of them is, and in what manner they should arrive. And what we discover is that we are typically wrong on all accounts.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“A horizon on the road of hope is nothing more than a starting point for the next horizon.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Hope crushed is never hope killed.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Sometimes we find that responsibly discerning something from a distance is nothing more than cowardice creating an excuse to keep our distance from that which we fear. And when that’s the case, life will shut down our discernment so that we are left with no option but to engage what we would otherwise run from.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“One of the greatest goals of all is to recognize the commonality of the grand that only appears uncommon because it is missed by the ignorance of our souls turned sour.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Sometimes in life we need to sit with things for a minute, maybe on the fringe of things, not only to savor the wealth of the moment, but take a moment to figure out how to respectfully engage it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Maybe the impossible was not based on how life actually worked, but on how we constricted life through our bluntly stunted vision and all the other abhorrent things that we did to keep it safe.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Hope is born in simple places to simple hearts that have enough space for a miracle to happen.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“The apparent reality is that life never quite permits us the certainty that we impose upon it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Sometimes you can have everything you want but fail to achieve anything you need.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Sad as it is, seems that the good always goes and gets replaced by something a whole lot less than good,” Aunt Mabel replied as she rearranged items in the old glass case. “Just seems we discard too much good in tryin’ to make things better. Maybe we should just enjoy what we got without always thinkin’ about what we don’t.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Maybe," David pondered, "That’s why we don’t know our futures. Maybe if we knew what was coming we’d mess with our lives so much that the very thing that life is calling us to do is the very thing we’d screw up.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“For, if we’re really going to give ourselves the best of ourselves, we have to be honest with the worst of ourselves.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“Sometimes time cannot sweep wonderful places and people into the backwater of our own histories because the preciousness of those places and those people refuses to be swept away.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey