Shannon L. Alder

“Love is so many things, but it is not safe.”

“The source to low self-esteem is the lack of control you feel you have in your life. If you spend your life competing with others, trying to make right the wrongs done to you, or waste your time trying to look right, you will never achieve contentment and emotional balance. People you encounter in life can’t be controlled by you. You only have control of yourself. Build your life around a relationship with a higher power and achieving what you’re passionate about. When you let go of what you can’t control, true peace can then enter your life. This is the path to achieving emotional balance.”

“Sometimes, God doesn’t send you into a battle to win it; he sends you to end it.”

“When you blame others, what you are really saying is what is inside of you can’t be fixed, so you have no control of your own happiness. Therefore, you have made the conscience choice to give focus and fuel to a bad situation that will take you nowhere and give you nothing, but ignorance and pain.”

“To be a follower of Christ and not just a fan means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

“Two people with mental issues in a relationship does not work. It's like sitting in a boat and neither one has an oar to row the other to shore. You can meet your mirror image in life, but that doesn't mean you should marry him.”

“You don't walk away to prove your worth. You walk away because you allowed someone else to dictate your value and you found yourself believing it.”

“You can make heaven out of hell, or hell out of heaven. The choice is yours.”

“You know you are on the right spiritual track when you realize that doing the right thing is not something you should do; rather, it is something you want to do. It is even something you have to do for your own peace, and the well-being of others.”

“All of us at one point end face up in a ditch, but only a few will choose to look up at the stars and dream.”

“The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.”

“It is where you want to be in the next five years, not where you are now.”

“Every writer dreams about the day they can step into their fiction and wander its hallways.”

“It isn't what you will do for your children that makes you a great mother or father. It is what you do for God that isn't self serving, which sets the stage for children to learn to care about something other than what is expected.”

“Seek a man that doesn't ask you to prove your love. Seek a man that will prove God's love.”

“Don’t ever feel bad that someone couldn’t give you all of their heart. Be grateful that you can take the least complicated part of their soul with you, wherever you go. This is more than some people will ever have.”

“Time doesn't heal all wounds, only distance can lessen the sting of them.”

“You will never know the moon or stars, unless you breathe in their solar system and inspect it from many diverse vantage points as possible.”

“If you want your prayers answered, you get off your knees and do the one thing you’re praying someone else will do for you.”

“I was never weighed down by beauty in my lifetime. However, I was beaten down by the sad fears of my gender- women who didn't allow you to feel pretty or rejoice in who you are, unless it fell beneath how they thought about themselves.”