12 Quotes by Edith Eger

Sometimes our pain pushes us, and sometimes our hope pulls us.

… feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal. And they are temporary. Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.

We cannot choose to have a life free of hurt. But we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter what befalls us, and to embrace the possible.

There are an infinite number of things you could have done differently in your life. Those choices are done, the past is gone, nothing can change that.

… to be free is to live in the present. If we are stuck in the past, saying, ‘If only I had gone there instead of here,’ or ‘If only I had married someone else,’ we are living in a prison of our own making. Likewise. if we spend our time in the future, saying, ‘I won’t be happy until I graduate,’ or ‘I won’t be happy until I find the right person.’ The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.

It’s important to assign blame to the perpetrators. Nothing is gained if we close our eyes to wrong, if we give someone a pass, if we dismiss accountability. But as my fellow survivors taught me, you can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich the present. You can live in the prison of the past, or you can let the past be the springboard that helps you reach the life you want now.

I want to make one thing perfectly clear. When I talk about victims and survivors, I am not blaming victims -- so many of whom never had a chance.

It’s a dangerous game to play what-if with the past.

Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken - you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you are fixing.