Joanna Brooks

“Religion is about responsibility to a community and a tradition ...”

“Courage doesn't mean being free from fear; it means learning to work through fear and speak even when we are afraid.”

“You see that? That big messy spiral of people, moving, trying to find God? I ask them, as the exodus unfolds once again on screen.That right there is Zion. Get there however you can.”

“This is a church of tenderness and arrogance, of sparkling differences and human failings. There is no unmixing the two.”

“What do we do with ourselves when we find we have failed to become the adults we dreamed as pious children?”

“I am not the same kind of Mormon girl I was when I was seven, eight, or eighteen years old.  I am not an orthodox Mormon woman like my mother.  I am an unorthodox Mormon woman with a fierce and hungry faith. ”

“Who watches over us when we leave?  Who remembers our names when disappear ourselves from home? Who hears the absence of our voices?  Who misses the sound of our stories?”

“I can’t go on like this, I told myself. And You can’t possibly want me to feel this way, I demanded of God.  God didn’t argue. Forced to choose between my nostalgia for the faith of my childhood and my dignity as an adult, I put down the doll and drove away.”

“How badly I wanted to belong as I had when I was a young Mormon girl, to be simply a working part in the great Mormon plan of salvation, a smiling exemplar of our sparkling difference. But instead I found myself a headstrong Mormon woman staking out her spiritual survival at a difficult point in Mormon history. ”

“How is it we come through the most difficult miles?  Do we come silent or singing?  Do we come in company, or do we come alone?  Are we all alone on the open plains under starlit skies, all alone with the cooing owls in the dark of early morning?  Our ancestors, our grandmothers, will their spirits take pity on us?”

“I said "it is my first language, my mother tongue, my family, my people, my home; it is my heart, my heart, my heart." No one says any of these things.  But they should.”