1. “Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
– Albert Camus
2. “I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships, I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
– Tahereh Mafi
3. “Books are easily destroyed. But words will live as long as people can remember them.”
– Tahereh Mafi
4. “The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.”
– Tahereh Mafi
5. “Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures. No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.”
– Tahereh Mafi
6. “Hope is hugging me, holding me in its arms, wiping away my tears and telling me that today and tomorrow and two days from now I will be just fine and I’m so delirious I actually dare to believe it.”
– Tahereh Mafi
7. “Sticks and stones keep breaking my bones but these words, these words will kill me.”
– Tahereh Mafi
8. “I’m not sure. But there’s something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There’s a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we’d never say in the light.”
– Tahereh Mafi
9. “His hands are holding my cheeks, and he pulls back just to look me in the eye and his chest is heaving and he says, “I think,” he says, “my heart is going to explode,” and I wish, more than ever, that I knew how to capture moments like these and revisit them forever.
Because this.
This is everything.”
– Tahereh Mafi
10. “I feel myself begin to blush and I wonder at my inability to be so free with words and feelings. I wonder at my incapacity for easy banter, smooth conversation, empty words to fill awkward moments. I don’t have a closet filled with umms and ellipses ready to insert at the beginnings and ends of sentences. I don’t know how to be a verb, an adverb, any kind of modifier. I’m a noun through and through.
Stuffed so full of people places things and ideas that I don’t know how to break out of my own brain. How to start a conversation. I want to trust but it scares the skin off my bones.”
– Tahereh Mafi
11. “Can you hear my heart? I want to ask him. I want you to make a list of all your favorite things, and I want to be on it.”
– Tahereh Mafi
12. “And we are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives we did not choose.”
– Tahereh Mafi
13. “There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.”
– Bram Stoker
14. “All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”
– Tahereh Mafi
15. “I’ve been screaming for years and no one has ever heard me.”
– Tahereh Mafi
16. “Loneliness is a strange sort of thing.
It creeps on you, quiet and still, sits by your side in the dark, strokes your hair as you sleep. It wraps itself around your bones, squeezing so tight you almost can’t breathe. It leaves lies in your heart, lies next to you at night, leaches the light out of every corner. It’s a constant companion, clasping your hand only to yank you down when you’re struggling to stand up.
You wake up in the morning and wonder who you are. You fail to fall asleep at night and tremble in your skin. You doubt you doubt you doubt.
do I
don’t I
should I
why won’t I
And even when you’re ready to let go. When you’re ready to break free. When you’re ready to be brand-new. Loneliness is an old friend standing beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. You can’t find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you’re not enough never enough never ever enough.
Loneliness is a bitter, wretched companion.
Sometimes it just won’t let go.”
– Tahereh Mafi
17. “It’s not charity,” I snap. “He cares about me–and I care about him!” Warner nods, unimpressed. “You should get a dog, love. I hear they share much the same qualities.”
– Tahereh Mafi
18. “I love walking into a bookstore. It’s like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.”
– Tahereh Mafi
19. “The books…they helped keep me from losing my mind altogether.”
– Tahereh Mafi
20. “Sometimes I think the loneliness inside of me is going to explode through my skin and sometimes I’m not sure if crying or screaming or laughing through the hysteria will solve anything at all. Sometimes I’m so desperate to touch, to be touched, to feel, that I’m almost certain I’m going to fall off a cliff in an alternate universe where no one will ever be able to find me.”
– Tahereh Mafi
21. “Honestly, if you were any slower, you’d be going backward.”
– J.K. Rowling
22. “Chronicler shook his head and Bast gave a frustrated sigh. “How about plays? Have you seen The Ghost and the Goosegirl or The Ha’penny King?” Chronicler frowned. “Is that the one where the king sells his crown to an orphan boy?” Bast nodded. “And the boy becomes a better king than the original. The goosegirl dresses like a countess and everyone is stunned by her grace and charm.” He hesitated, struggling to find the words he wanted. “You see, there’s a fundamental connection between seeming and being. Every Fae child knows this, but you mortals never seem to see. We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.” Chronicler relaxed a bit, sensing familiar ground. “That’s basic psychology. You dress a beggar in fine clothes, people treat him like a noble, and he lives up to their expectations.” “That’s only the smallest piece of it,” Bast said. “The truth is deeper than that. It’s…” Bast floundered for a moment. “It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” Frowning, Chronicler opened his mouth, but Bast held up a hand to stop him. “No, listen. I’ve got it now. You meet a girl: shy, unassuming. If you tell her she’s beautiful, she’ll think you’re sweet, but she won’t believe you. She knows that beauty lies in your beholding.” Bast gave a grudging shrug. “And sometimes that’s enough.” His eyes brightened. “But there’s a better way. You show her she is beautiful. You make mirrors of your eyes, prayers of your hands against her body. It is hard, very hard, but when she truly believes you…” Bast gestured excitedly. “Suddenly the story she tells herself in her own head changes. She transforms. She isn’t seen as beautiful. She is beautiful, seen.” “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Chronicler snapped. “You’re just spouting nonsense now.” “I’m spouting too much sense for you to understand,” Bast said testily. “But you’re close enough to see my point.”
– Patrick Rothfuss
23. “I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
– John Green
24. “To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
– Federico García Lorca
25. “I wouldn’t change it,” Simon said. “I wouldn’t give up loving you. Not for anything. You know what Raphael told me? That I didn’t know how to be a good vampire, that vampires accept that they’re dead. But as long as I remember what it was like to love you, I’ll always feel like I’m alive.”
– Cassandra Clare
26. “Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.”
– Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home
27. “There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.”
– Jim Butcher, White Night
28. “When you have lived either a very short time or a very long time—if you’ve lived well—you will be able to love easily, too. Broken hearts have fresh places to bond with new faces.”
– Brent Weeks, The Broken Eye
29. “It was like a child addressing a tidal wave, saying, I will not be moved—and before the words are out of his mouth, all is ocean, leaving no sign; not only no sign of the child, but no sign of his defiance, no sign that anything opposed the crushing sea in the least, no eddy, no swirl, no detritus, only simple, plain, indisputable nothingness.”
– Brent Weeks, The Broken Eye
30. “It’s so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it’s taking forever to come. Then it happens and it’s over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.”
– Lauren Oliver, Delirium
31. “Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew – knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest – was how love gave someone the power to break you”
– Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
32. “I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.”
– Salvador Plascencia
33. “One of the most amazing things that can happen is finding someone who sees everything you are and won’t let you be anything less. They see the potential of you. They see endless possibilities. And through their eyes, you start to see yourself the same way as someone who matters to you; As someone who can make a difference in the world. If you’re lucky enough to find this person, never let them go.”
– Susane Colasanti
34. “I don’t know how to love without using my whole heart. I don’t know what it’s like to love someone ‘half way’. I practice giving love in the same way I’d like to receive it.”
– Reyna Biddy
35. “In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.”
– Isaac Marion
36. “My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.”
– John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
37. “And she finds it difficult to believe––that a person would love her even when she isn’t trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.”
– Margaret Atwood
38. “I want to be the last person who ever kisses you… That sounds bad, like a death threat or something. What I’m trying to say is, you’re it. This is it for me.”
– Rainbow Rowell
39. “It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others—even my nearest and dearest—there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.”
– Maureen Corrigan
40. “Breathe. You’re going to be okay. Breathe and remember that you’ve been in this place before. You’ve been this uncomfortable and anxious and scared, and you’ve survived. Breathe and know that you can survive this too. These feelings can’t break you. They’re painful and debilitating, but you can sit with them and eventually, they will pass. Maybe not immediately, but sometime soon, they are going to fade and when they do, you’ll look back at this moment and laugh for having doubted your resilience. I know it feels unbearable right now, but keep breathing, again and again. This will pass. I promise it will pass.”
– Daniell Koepke
41. “Writing is like tearing out your own heart and placing it in the hands of a stranger.”
– Ramn Grewal
42. “I’ve always been enchanted by the endings of things. Series finales and sunsets. Last paragraphs and encores. I think for the way they remind me that losing something you love isn’t always sad and heartbreaking, but sometimes breathtaking and beautiful.”
– Beau Taplin
43. “I’m the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.”
– Anne Sexton
44. “A few weeks before he died, I asked him, “Can you breathe okay with my head on your chest like this?” His answer was “It’s the only way I know how to breathe.”
– Paul Kalanithi
45. “Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
– D.W. Winnicott
46. “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”
– Gilda Radner
47. “To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
– Arundhati Roy
48. “The most important piece of advice I could offer an INFP is that not everyone else feels with the same intensity as we do. This is not to say that everyone is cold and emotionless compared to INFPs, more so that the over-emotional reaction that I would have to a situation isn’t a universal response. I used to walk through life on eggshells because I was terrified that I would hurt people’s feelings the same way little words and actions had the power to shatter my day. I think INFPs are so often perceived as pushovers and meek because to hurt someone’s feelings is the worst insult imaginable, so staying quiet and keeping the peace is a much easier option. It took delving into the MBTI and gently testing the boundaries to work out that I could stand up for myself, voice my opinion and say no when I needed to, and other people wouldn’t be personally offended. Your opinion (even if it’s the one others don’t want) isn’t going to create that emotional tsunami you’ve been dreading.”
Heidi Priebe, The Comprehensive INFP Survival Guide
49. Write down a time when you’ve felt this way before. Write down how the experience played out. Write down which steps or actions that helped you overcome this emotion. Write down what it felt like to be past—or on the other side of—the emotional experience. Write down what it might look like to be on the other side of this emotional experience. Write down which actions or concrete steps may help you get there.
Heidi Priebe, The Comprehensive INFP Survival Guide
50p. She said to me once “sometimes people leave and all I feel is relief,” and I wanted to wrap her in a blanket and hold her hand when she crossed the street and tell her happy stories every night until she wondered if maybe caring about something could turn out ok.
– Ellen Nichole Nielsen
51. “Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.”
– Cassandra Clare
52. We are healing every day. It just doesn’t always look like it.
– Ari Eastman
53. “I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.”
– Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
54. “I want to be in a relationship where you telling me you love me is just a ceremonious validation of what you already show me.”
– Steve Maraboli
55. “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
– J.K. Rowling
56. “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
– J.K. Rowling
57. “We’re petrified of saying too much or saying it wrong. When the truth is, the only wrong thing you can say is nothing at all.”
– Grey’s Anatomy
58. “You didn’t love her! You just didn’t want to be alone. Or maybe, maybe she was good for your ego. Or, or maybe she made you feel better about your miserable life, but you didn’t love her, because you don’t destroy the person that you love!”
– Grey’s Anatomy
59. “There’s an end to every storm. Once all the trees have been uprooted. Once all the houses have been ripped apart. The wind will hush. The clouds will part. The rain will stop. The sky will clear in an instant and only then, in those quiet moments after the storm, do we learn who was strong enough to survive it.”
– Grey’s Anatomy
60. “Intimacy is a four-syllable word for ‘Here are my heart and soul, please grind them into hamburger, and enjoy.'”
– Grey’s Anatomy
61. “You’re letting her think you’re emotionally available. You’re letting her think she has a chance. And there is nothing worse in the world than thinking you have a chance when you really don’t.”
– Grey’s Anatomy
62. “What’s up with the need to hit the self-destruct button? Maybe we like the pain. Maybe we’re wired that way because without it…. I don’t know. Maybe we just wouldn’t feel real. What’s that saying… Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop.”
– Grey’s Anatomy
63. “We’ve all done things we weren’t proud of. I understand that. I know nobody’s perfect, but how do you live with it? How do you get up every morning knowing you could have done better, that you should have done better? Is being sorry enough? Can an apology actually heal our wounds? Ease our pain? Can it undo the hurt that we’ve caused?”
– Grey’s Anatomy
64. “Pain, you just have to ride it out, hope it goes away on its own, hope the wound that caused it heals. There are no solutions, no easy answers, you just breathe deep and wait for it to subside. Most of the time pain can be managed but sometimes the pain gets you where you least expect it. Hits way below the belt and doesn’t let up. Pain, you just have to fight through, because the truth is you can’t outrun it and life always makes more.”
– Grey’s Anatomy
65. “We’ve all hit that point of exhaustion. The point where nothing makes sense anymore. Your body hurts, your brain becomes foggy, and you feel like you’re trapped in a tunnel. When all you want is your bed. So, how do you keep going? How do you not just sit down and give up? Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes you play games in your head. You make up someone. Someone good. Whatever you need. To keep you going.”
– Grey’s Anatomy
66. “Gratitude. Appreciation. Giving thanks. No matter what words you use, it all means the same thing: happy. We’re supposed to be happy. Grateful; for friends, family, happy to just be alive. Weather we like it or not. Maybe we’re not supposed to be happy. Maybe gratitude has nothing to do with joy. Maybe being grateful means recognizing what you have for what it is. Appreciating small victories. Admiring the struggle it takes simply to be human. Maybe we’re thankful for the familiar things we know. And maybe we’re thankful for the things we’ll never know. At the end of the day the fact that we have the courage to still be standing is reason enough to celebrate.”
– Grey’s Anatomy
67. “Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
68. “Not all stories speak to all listeners, but all listeners can find a story that does, somewhere, sometime. In one form or another.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
69. “Everyone wants the stars. Everyone wishes to grasp that which exists out of reach. To hold the extraordinary in their hands and keep the remarkable in their pockets.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
70. “Be brave,” she says. “Be bold. Be loud. Never change for anyone but yourself. Any soul worth their star-stuff will take the whole package as is and however it grows. Don’t waste your time on anyone who doesn’t believe you when you tell them how you feel.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
71. “But the world is strange and endings are not truly endings no matter how the stars might wish it so.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
72. “It is easier to be in love in a room with closed doors. To have the whole world in one room. One person. The universe condensed and intensified and burning, bright and alive and electric.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
73. “It doesn’t look like anything special, like it contains an entire world, though the same could be said of any book.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
74. “For a while I was looking for a person but I didn’t find them and after that I was looking for myself. Now that I’ve found me I’m back to exploring, which is what I was doing in the first place before I was doing anything else and I think I was supposed to be exploring all along.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
75. “Spiritual but not religious,” Zachary clarifies. He doesn’t say what he is thinking, which is that his church is held-breath story listening and late-night-concert ear-ringing rapture and perfect-boss fight-button pressing. That his religion is buried in the silence of freshly fallen snow, in a carefully crafted cocktail, in between the pages of a book somewhere after the beginning but before the ending.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
76. “There are so many pieces to a person. So many small stories and so few opportunities to read them. ‘I would like to look at you’ seems like such an awkward request.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
77. “How are you feeling? Zachary asks. “Like I’m losing my mind but in a slow, achingly beautiful sort of way.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
78. “They asked if I thought he would have done something – like jumped-off-a-bridge something – and I said I didn’t think so, but I also think most of us are two steps away from jumping off something most of the time and you never know if the next day is going to push you in one way or another.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
79. “She is young enough to carry fear with her without letting it into her heart. Without being scared. She wears her fear lightly, like a veil, aware that there are dangers but letting the crackling awareness hover around her. It does not sink in, it buzzes in excitement like a swarm of invisible bees.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
80. “You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
81. “This person is a place Zachary could lose himself in, and never wish to be found.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
82. “He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything. That none of it is important. That who he is, or who he thinks he is, is just a collection of references to other people’s art and he is so focused on story and meaning and structure that he wants his world to have all of it neatly laid out and it never, ever does and he fears it never will. He tells her things he has never told anyone.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
83. “The space Dorian enters is the antithesis of what he has left, warm brightness erasing the dark cold. A large open hall filled with firelight and books, dark wood beams and windows covered in frost. It smells of spiced wine and baking bread. It is comforting in a way that defies words. It feels like a hug, if a hug were a place.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
84. “There’s this feeling August has had everywhere she’s ever lived, like she’s not really there. Like it’s all happening in a dream. She walks down the street, and it’s like she’s floating a few inches off the pavement, never rooted down. She touches things, a canister of sugar at a coffee shop, or the post of a street sign warm from the afternoon sun, and it feels like she hasn’t touched anything at all, like it’s all a place she lives in concept. She’s just out here, shoes untied, hair a mess, no idea where she’s going, scraping her knees and not bleeding.”
– Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop
85. “When you spend your whole life alone, it’s incredibly appealing to move somewhere big enough to get lost in. Where being alone looks like a choice.”
– Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop
86. “Sometimes the point is to be sad, August. Sometimes you just have to feel it because it deserves to be felt.”
– Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop
87. “People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’- that’s intimacy.”
– Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
88. “You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until somewhat stands behind you and says, “It’s OK, you can fall down now. I’ll catch you.”
– Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
89. “I used to think soul mates were two of the same. I used to think I was supposed to look for somebody that was like me. I don’t believe in soul mates anymore and I’m not looking for anything. But if I did believe in them, I’d believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn’t, that needed all the things you had. Not somebody who’s suffering from the same stuff you are.”
– Taylor Jenkins Reid , Daisy Jones & The Six
90. “Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.”
– Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
91. “You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.”
– Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six
92. “Forgiving isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. It’s saying, ‘You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.’ It’s saying, ‘You don’t get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.”
– Jodi Picoult:
93. “That’s the paradox of loss: How can something that’s gone weigh us down so much?”
– Jodi Picoult:
94. “That’s why we read fiction, isn’t it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we’re not the only ones?”
– Jodi Picoult:
95. “I don’t know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it’s the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now…if she is somewhere. It’s the question mark that comes with death that we can’t face, not the period.”
– Jodi Picoult:
96. “If you’ve lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it, and if you didn’t – you will never understand.”
– Jodi Picoult:
97. “What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet?
– Jodi Picoult:
98. Love isn’t the only word that fails.
Hate does, too.”
“What he did was wrong. He doesn’t deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it’s choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you.”
– Jodi Picoult:
99. “I don’t believe in God. But sitting there, in a room full of those who feel otherwise, I realize that I do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds, I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for — even if it’s just a better tomorrow — is the most powerful drug on this planet.”
– Jodi Picoult:
100. “Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”
– Dot Hutchison
101. “If you expect to be overlooked or forgotten, you’re always at least a little surprised when someone remembers you. You’re always outside understanding those strange creatures who actually expect people to remember and come back.”
– Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden
102. “You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
– Dr. Seuss
103. “It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
– Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
104. “I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.”
– Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
105. “My parents danced together, her head on his chest. Both had their eyes closed. They seemed so perfectly content. If you can find someone like that, someone who you can hold and close your eyes to the world with, then you’re lucky. Even if it only lasts for a minute or a day. The image of them gently swaying to the music is how I picture love in my mind even after all these years.”
– Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
106. “I thought of all the others who had tried to tie her to the ground and failed. So I resisted showing her the songs and poems I had written, knowing that too much truth can ruin a thing. And if that meant she wasn’t entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. But there was always a part of me that hoped for more, and so there was a part of me that was always a fool.”
– Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear
107. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
– Anais Nin
108. “The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself.”
– C. JoyBell C.
109. “Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.”
– Heath L. Buckmaster, Box of Hair: A Fairy Tale
110. “Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.”
– Ann Landers
111. “If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you’re allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.”
– Shannon L. Alder
112. “There’s nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.”
– Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
113. “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
114. “Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls- which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn’t it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?”
– Donna Tartt, The Secret History
115. “We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.”
– Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
116. “Above all, I didn’t want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion – an apt phrase, given John’s worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.”
– Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
117. “But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.”
– Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
118. “What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction—a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity. It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.”
– Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
119. “If you stay in therapy,” I say softly, “you might have to let go of the hope for a better childhood—but that’s only so that you can create a better adulthood.”
– Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
120. “The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things—leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator—they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.”
– Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
121. “Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.”
– Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
122. “Forgiveness is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better?”
– Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
123. “If we have a choice between believing one of two things, both of which we have evidence for — I’m unlovable, I’m lovable – often we choose the one that makes us feel bad. Why do we keep our radios tuned to the same static-ridden stations (the everyone’s-life-is-better-than-mine, the I-can’t-trust-people station, the nothing-works-out-for-me station) instead of moving the dial up or down? Change the station. Walk around the bars. Who’s stopping us but ourselves?”
– Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
124. “Well you seem like you’re enjoying the experience of suffering, so I thought I’d help you out with that… There’s a difference between pain and suffering,’ Wendell says, ‘You’re going to have to feel pain- everyone feels pain at times- but you don’t have to suffer so much. You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering”
– Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed