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Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.
You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.
True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.
We are about to live the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.”
I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.
“I don’t mind worriers,” I said. “Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”
and I kept thinking about how sky is a singular noun, as if it’s one thing. But the sky isn’t one thing. The sky is everything. And last night, it was enough.
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” —WILLIAM JAMES
What’s the difference between who you are and what you have? Maybe nothing.
Your now is not your forever. I
“Being vulnerable is asking to get used.”
What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.”
Life is a series of choices between wonders.
Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.
having a thought was not dangerous, that thoughts aren’t actions, that thoughts are just thoughts.
the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.
“The problem with happy endings,” I said, “is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.”
You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you
don’t choose what’s in the picture, but you decide on the frame.”
To be alive is to be missing.
So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift. You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.
no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.
