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You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone.
was okay to be different from everyone else.
Live boldly, Clark.
If someone likes you, they will stay with you; if they don’t like you enough to stay with you, they aren’t worth being with anyway.
We’re still under the same sky.”
You only get one
“You gotta have your places for community.”
“You gotta have places where people can meet and talk and exchange ideas and it not just be about money, you know?
Books are what teach you about life. Books teach you empathy. But you can’t buy books if you barely got enough to make rent. So that library is a vital resource! You shut a library, Louisa, you ...
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“knowledge is power.”
Time with my family was precious and I wouldn’t ruin it by feeling sad.
Top of the list is the death of the person you love.
I wouldn’t always feel so sad.
Everything has its time.
All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make the difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.”
I’ve spent my whole life looking after someone else and now there’s nobody left who even needs me.”
It’s not about who needs you—it’s about finally devoting some time to yourself.”
didn’t think about Sam. I’d become very good at that. “You know,” she said, “when you get to my age, the pile of regrets becomes so huge it can obscure the view terribly.”
simply existing in each moment,
you can hang on to your hurt out of some misplaced sense of pride, or you can just let go and relish whatever precious time you have.”
“You’re that kind of person.”
not to live some vicarious idea of a full life but to live my own dream. The problem was, I don’t think I’d ever really worked out what that dream was.
I guess I’m just afraid that if I let myself fall again I’ll be setting myself up for more hurt. It’s complicated.”
I thought about how you’re shaped so much by the people who surround you, and how careful you have to be in choosing them for this exact reason, and then I thought, despite all that, in the end maybe you have to lose them all in order to truly find yourself.
To new beginnings,
All my life I’ve ended up looking after other people, fitting myself around what they need, what they wanted. I’m good at it.
I love the fact that every day I get to reimagine who I want to be.
When people we love die young it’s a nudge, reminding us that we shouldn’t take any of it for granted, that we have a duty to make the most of what we have.
“WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE SHALL BE THE STABILITY OF THY TIMES.”
There are so many versions of ourselves we can choose to be.
key was making sure that anyone you allowed to walk beside you didn’t get to decide which you were, and pin you down like a butterfly in a case. The key was to know that you could always somehow find a way to reinvent yourself again.
A million lives below me, a million heartbreaks big and small, tales of joy and loss and survival, a million little victories every day. There is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.
