More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.” —James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
He was ambitious, yes, and sometimes careless, but something is rotting inside him now. It’s only lately I’ve smelled the stench.
There’s too much smoke for there to be no fire at all, and watching my daughter come apart, watching our lives fall apart, I’m afraid we’ll all get burned.
She’s stronger than she looks. I bet many underestimate her. I won’t make that mistake.
All loves aren’t created equal. Some spring from the earth and wrap around and twine through our souls like vines. Some are plants that start with tiny seeds in your heart and blossom over time, nurtured by years and commitment.
There aren’t enough sonnets for friendship. Not enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care. They are the ones we choose to laugh and cry and live with. When lovers come and go, friends are the ones who remain. We are each other’s constants.
“You accept a man shitting on you,” she used to say, “he’ll make himself at home. There’s no three strikes. You use me, take me for granted, you prove you don’t deserve to be in my life.”
It’s him. His sorry, no-character, vow-breaking ass. Men married to the most gorgeous women in the world still cheat.
There is a lot she has lost over the last few days, not the least of which is her marriage, but there is something that she’s found. Without even knowing exactly what it is, I can see she plans to hold on to it.
My whole life is now DIY… or rather DIM. Do it myself because there’s no one else who will.
“I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” —Emily Dickinson, personal correspondence
Do they dismiss your feelings as ‘crazy,’ but others in your life don’t agree? Do you often feel manipulated? Controlled? Like you’re losing your sense of self? Then you might be married to a narcissist.”
I’m learning that to love and be loved is a perfectly healthy desire, unless we believe that relationship is somehow supposed to make us feel worthy or fulfilled. There’s so much pressure not to be alone that sometimes it makes you feel like as a single person you don’t have as much identity. It compels us to search for that person who will make us feel whole.”
Our family is on its own journey, and we’ll take it at our own pace, one day at a time.
“I’m moving to Austin.” Lola eeeeks and covers her face. “As in Texas?” I ask, willing all my frown muscles not to flex. “Yes, Texas,” Lola says. “And you’re endangering your reproductive rights for what?” I ask.
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” —bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
There’s something bold about eating alone, enjoying your own company and not waiting for nobody.
I’m that girl who chose comfort over truth. Did I ignore what was wrong in my marriage, with my husband, because I wasn’t sure there was anything else for me? Did I not want to disrupt life for my girls? Or was it that I didn’t want to disrupt life for myself? Those are questions that demand answers.”
“Just acting my wage,”
“As fast as God gives,” Yasmen says, “as fast as you get. One thing you shouldn’t second-guess is a blessing.”
I’m not crying because I might break. I’m crying because I’m healing, and I’m just so damn grateful for the journey I’ve chosen.
And yet… there is this ache, not a hole. It’s not that part of me is missing. I feel whole on my own. Not an ache inside, but an ache by my side. That’s where the hole is.
I am the love of my life. I have learned to love myself without judgment or condition.
He said what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. I know what he meant. When we have hard times, huge changes that seem to be the end of the world as we know it, it’s actually an incubator for metamorphosis. For a new beginning.
When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through. I’m a hornet. I can love. And I can sting.
Life is always gonna be complicated, but the good stuff is worth fighting for.
“I fall in love with myself and I want someone to share it with me.” —Eartha Kitt, iconic actress
