The Love That Split the World

by Emily Henry

Life felt like a blender that wanted to eat me.

God is a thing I think I see in glimmers all over: an enormous and vague warmth I sometimes catch pulsing around me, giving me shivers and making tears prick my eyes; a mysterious and limitless Thing threaded through all the world and refusing to be reduced to a name or a set of rules and instead winding itself through millions of stories, true and made up, connecting all breathing things.

judging a story by the ending alone, or a life by its death alone, is as pointless as judging a long hike through the mountains by the fact that when you get back to where you parked your car, there’s a pit toilet full of you-know-what and beer cans.”

No matter how hard it feels, you don’t need to be afraid to move on, and you don’t need to be afraid to stay either. There’s always more to see and feel.”

Most of your classmates never worried about who they were when they were ten years old. Don’t get me wrong, eventually they will—probably in six months when they’re on their own for the first time. But right now most of them are just living their lives. So why aren’t you? Because you have conditioned yourself to spend the vast majority of your time trying to know yourself. You are incapable of letting any feeling go unnamed. Your quest for self-awareness has resulted in crippling self-consciousness.

You’re not missing something. You’re not broken. Your grand identity will not be revealed to you like a bolt of lightning. It’s okay to be scared. Your big feelings are powerful. But it’s not okay to hide, especially when what you want more than anything is to be known. Don’t shut down. Stick this out.

“I can tell you that the pain of living is worth it. That if you live, your life will be as full of love as it is darkness, and for every moment of pain, you’ll have one of joy too.

worthiness isn’t a factor in whether we’re alive or loved.

the world’s going to keep right on being terrible and beautiful all at once.”