A Different Kind of Gone

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

“Everybody has bad judgment starting out as a grown-up. We’re not born with good or bad judgment. It’s something we have to develop. We learn it by the hard knocks of experience. People don’t want to think you never made a mistake, because there is no such thing. They want to figure you learned something from it. If you lie to make people think better of you it’ll always backfire. Because then they just figure anything could be true in your life and they’d never know it, because you’d never let it show. You want somebody to respect you? Tell ’em you messed up.

“We’re swimming in a sea of unintended consequences.”

“I’m doing it anyway.” “Oh, I knew you would. Nobody ever talks anybody else out of anything once they have their mind set.”

It just seems to be the way we’re made. The way we’re wired. People can talk to us till they’re blue in the face, telling us to learn from their experience. But we don’t learn that way—from other people’s experiences. We just don’t. We learn from our own.

you teach her to love herself and to treat herself well. People who treat themselves well expect others to treat them well, too.

Help her value herself.

The less we feed something, the more likely it is to move along.”

in this life you can choose whatever you want. But take a look at the price tag first, because you’re going to have to pay for it.’