Qualifications,” he said, “pale in the face of confidence.
Ten years I’d simmered in my own self-righteousness, holding my grudge against her as if the only way to win was to stay mad the longest.
But the things we remember are what we hold on to, and what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives. We only get one story. And I am determined to make mine a good one.
I guess who you are always seems normal to you because you don’t know what it feels like to be anyone else.
When things got tough, I went for a run. I ran in the rain. I ran at night sometimes – or at four in the morning.
Human connection had its upsides, but it sure was a lot of work. The risk-reward ratio was low, at best.
We’re just going to have to wait for-” Then she saw us, and looked Ian over, in his flannel shirt and jeans. “The Brawny paper-towel guy.
I don’t think trying to be happy means you can never be sad,” I said. “Right?
I’d saturate my brain with such an overabundance of gratitude for every little joy around me that I wouldn’t have any room for envy, or loneliness, or sorrow... I’d be too insulated by happiness to even care.
I don’t want my kids to be like me. I want them to be better than me.
Life is always a struggle between who you are and who you’d like to be. It’s always a negotiation between how you want it and how it is. There’s no changing that.
I have a theory that we are at our meanest when we feel threatened. People really seem to do their worst when they think you’re out to hurt them, or steal from them, or take something that’s rightfully theirs.
It just seems to me there’s enough pain in the world – and not nearly enough pleasure. I guess once you’ve had enough kidney stones, hot candle wax on the nipples seems less appealing.
It takes guts to walk into a burning building or staunch an arterial bleed – no question. But it also takes a special kind of brain. Firefighters think differently from other people, and this is especially true of me. Because when everybody else is panicking, when the entire whole world is freaking the heck out – that’s when I get calm.
He was like a Latino firefighting Ken doll – so bizarrely perfect, he wasn’t even real.
You know what?” my dad said, reading us perfectly, “I think our girl needs some rest.” He’d been with my mom for thirty years. He was an expert on damage control.
Isn’t there enough misery in the world? Do I really have to spend my leisure time absorbing more of it?
I wanted to grab onto him like a life preserver in an empty ocean.
We didn’t fix everything for each other – but we didn’t have to. We just made a choice to be there. Which counted for a lot.
We had both moved on. We could both be okay at the same time. We weren’t on a seesaw, for Pete’s sake! There was plenty of okay to go around.