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Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community.

Parker J. Palmer

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Parker J. Palmer
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More quotes by Parker J. Palmer

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My favorite topping is one that a lot of people don't like. I love anchovies.
Parker J. Palmer
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Death in various forms is sometimes comforting, while resurrection and new life can be demanding and threatening. If I lived as if resurrection were real, and allowed myself to die for the sake of a new life, what might I be called upon to do?
Parker J. Palmer
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When you are with young people, it is almost inconceivable that things wouldn't arise that you'd have to respond to, such as someone wrestling on the bus. And how you handle that, how you respond to that, how you deal with that is a lesson to the people you are on the bus with.
Parker J. Palmer
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Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks--we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.
Parker J. Palmer
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Students want to know, Are you painting by the numbers, or are you really present as a human being to what you are doing and is it coming from inside of you? So I would ask teachers this question: Do you have a wellgrounded personal experience and conviction concerning whatever it is you are trying to teach?
Parker J. Palmer
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Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.
Parker J. Palmer
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Everybody is on a lifelong journey toward trying to live more deeply. There is nobody who can say, Well, I've got that one checked off my to-do list. We have to be honest with ourselves about where we are on this journey and about the difficulty of living in our own identities and integrity.
Parker J. Palmer
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Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now - in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.
Parker J. Palmer
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Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.
Parker J. Palmer
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It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.
Parker J. Palmer
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Good teachers join self and subject and students in the fabric of life.
Parker J. Palmer
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I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.
Parker J. Palmer
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Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.
Parker J. Palmer
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Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.
Parker J. Palmer
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When someone says 'I'm so disillusioned', I say 'Congratulations! You've lost another illusion.'
Parker J. Palmer
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There is a tradition that the church represents, without which we wouldn't have the church, that's all about diving deep beneath the surface of the culture and finding those timeless, eternal truths that the whole Christian enterprise is rooted in. And one of those is that you don't come to God at 180 miles an hour.
Parker J. Palmer
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The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.
Parker J. Palmer
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We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.
Parker J. Palmer
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Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.
Parker J. Palmer
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Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.
Parker J. Palmer