You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.

Forgiving is an affair strictly between a victim and a victimizer. Everyone else should step aside...The worst wounds I ever felt were the ones people gave to my children. Wrong my kids, you wrong me. And my hurt qualifies me to forgive you. But only for the pain you caused me when you wounded them. My children alone are qualified to forgive you for what you did to them.

If we say that monsters [people who do terrible evil] are beyond forgiving, we give them a power they should never have...they are given the power to keep their evil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most. We give them power to condemn their victims to live forever with the hurting memory of their painful pasts. We give the monsters the last word.

The first and often only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness... When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

We forgive freely or we do not really forgive at all.

We feel properly embarrassed when we are caught doing something that makes us look inept, knuckleheaded, or inappropriate. Maybe the difference is this: we feel embarrassed because we look bad, and we feel shame because we think we are bad. When we are embarrassed, we feel socially foolish. When we are shamed, we feel morally unworthy.