He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he’d become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.
The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.
Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.
Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves…
Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before.
To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.
I think it’s neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me–just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we’d be better off.
There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.
In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.
You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have?
There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.
But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.
I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.
It was good. It was like something inordinately beautiful and out of this world. Like I’d found an actual planet that I didn’t know had been there all along. Planet Heroin. The place where there was no pain.
My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.
There are so many torturous things in this life. Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.
But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
Very nice,” said Rick after a while. “Very nice,” he repeated, with more emphasis the second time. “What is?” I asked, turning to him, though I knew. “Everything,” he said. And it was true.
And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.
You’ve earned the right to grow. You’re going to have to carry the water yourself.
…but thinking about it didn’t do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn’t have a bottom.
I hope when people ask what you’re going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you’ll say: … Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.
Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do — have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly.
The place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. it’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.
It’s a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.
Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right.
Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
I’d never had a mind for math. … It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.
It felt now as if I’d never known them and I couldn’t know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I’d grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.
He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.
In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.
.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.
It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubled my abilities, only when I thought how far i had yet to go that i lost faith that I would get there
When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.
He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I’d always know even if I never saw him again.
God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.
One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It’s like a mirror is being held up just about an inch to your face.
It’s not about becoming a movie star. It’s about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are.
My mother’s death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I’ve grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don’t exist materially.