Allowing ourselves to show our vulnerability is how we make human connections. If we’re not showing other people our true selves, our weaknesses and flaws, how can we ever allow ourselves to be known?
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Horrible as this is to admit, I think I cried less because my dad was dying than for the dad I had never had.
You must work to live, not live to work.
She was the child with the flashlight under the duvet late into every night. She would breeze through a book in a day and a half, then read it six more times.
The definition of insanity is doing what you’ve always done and expecting different results.
Other people’s behavior is none of my business.
What he didn’t do was control me, or try to mold me into a little wife, some old-fashioned, muted version of who I was. I saw many men do that to many women I knew. They would choose these vibrant, talented, beautiful women, and suck the life and passion and beauty out of them by bullying them into submission.
Everyone wants to help,” she spat.
She had never liked those kinds of parties, or truthfully, any parties at all. She was much better on a one-on-one basis, or with small groups of people she knew well and felt comfortable with. Much.
The first place I go in someone’s house is their bookshelves. You can tell exactly who they are.
I’m just scared that you’ve fallen for the way he’s treating you rather than for the man himself.
He was sensitive, quiet. He liked parties that were small and intimate, where you could connect with people, hear one another’s thoughts, not parties with roaring music, meat markets where you couldn’t hear one another think.
And, then, sometime between December 26 and January 1, the festivity ends and I straggle back to my apartment feeling exhausted, broke, and somehow lonelier than before. This is when I start wondering if it might not be better for everyone if Christmas were an event staged every four years, like the Olympics. But.
No seriously. She looks like a banana. She’s wearing bright yellow and brown. It’s making me hungry just looking at her.
The key to happiness is not getting what you want but wanting what you get.
Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie’.
She would talk to him in the car, ask him something, then turn on the radio and find her question answered by the lyrics of a song; pick up a book and turn to a random page, to find the words that were exactly what she needed to hear. There is no such thing as coincidence, she would think, blowing a kiss of thanks to the heavens.
Shock doesn’t hit all at once. I have learned.
If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we will get what we have always got, and that isn’t enough. I want something different for my life.