Joy > Joy's Quotes

“Show me a woman who can hold space for a man in real fear and vulnerability, and I’ll show you a woman who’s learned to embrace her own vulnerability and who doesn’t derive her power or status from that man. Show me a man who can sit with a woman in real fear and vulnerability and just hear her struggle without trying to fix it or give advice, and I’ll show you a man who’s comfortable with his own vulnerability and doesn’t derive his power from being Oz, the all-knowing and all-powerful.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

“You know, and so, I've come to this belief that, if you show me a woman who can sit with a man in real vulnerability, in deep fear, and be with him in it, I will show you a woman who, A, has done her work and, B, does not derive her power from that man. And if you show me a man who can sit with a woman in deep struggle and vulnerability and not try to fix it, but just hear her and be with her and hold space for it, I'll show you a guy who's done his work and a man who doesn't derive his power from controlling and fixing everything.”
― Brene Brown

“I walk with my shadow behind me, sometimes ahead, and often to the side. It is my capricious companion: visible, then hidden, amorphous. A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don't want to see. If we refuse to face our shadow, it will project itself on someone else so we have no choice but to engage it.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“Hold your own space and honor yourself and don't let that space shrink or collapse in the company of indifference. Don't ask indifference to love you. Indifference can go fuck itself. This is your life, and it's going to be big and bright and beautiful.”
― Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life

“I supposed in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Here's the thing: being nice is worthless if you're just going to feel resentful about it in the end.”
― Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life

“I used to admire people who could hang with anything. Now the women I admire most are women who never pretend to be different than they are. Women like that express their anger. They admit when they're down. They don't beat themselves up over their bad moods. They allow themselves the right to be grouchy, or to say nothing, or to decline your offer without a lengthy explanation.”
― Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life

“You are weak and raw and broken, and that's okay. That's where real life begins. Throw yourself into that rawness., Dive into a bunch of stories about absorbing and leaning into disappointment and loss and melancholy as a way of moving through it.”
― Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life

“As a parent, you do have to constantly remind yourself that you are not a god, molding a human in your own image. You are merely supporting whatever your child chooses to become, even if those choices don't always thrill you.”
― Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life

“Being raw means connecting to other people's trials and noticing how we all have to find our own answers; we all have to learn how to show up and breathe without grasping for something to deliver us from our own pain. When you resist your own rawness and pain, you only create more pain for yourself.”
― Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life

“This world is filled with people who think feeling less, being indifferent, makes you strong. Don't believe that. Be one of the smart, thoughtful people who stands up for sensitive people. When you stand up for sensitive, hurt people, you're also standing up for vulnerability and authenticity and true love.”
― Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life

“Uncertainty and failure might look like the end of the road to you. But uncertainty is a part of life. Facing uncertainty and failure doesn’t always make people weaker and weaker until they give up. Sometimes it wakes them up, and it’s like they can see the beauty around them for the first time. Sometimes losing everything makes you realize how little you actually need. Sometimes losing everything sends you out into the world to breathe in the air, to pick some flowery weeds, to take in a new day.

Because this life is full of promise, always. It’s full of beads and dolls and chipped plates; it’s full of twinklings and twinges. It is possible to admit that life is a struggle and also embrace the fact that small things—like sons who call you and beloved dogs in framed pictures and birds that tell you to drink your fucking tea—matter. They matter a lot.

Stop trying to make sense of things. You can’t think your way through this. Open your heart and drink in this glorious day. You are young, and you will find little things that will make you grateful to be alive. Believe in what you love now, with all of your heart, and you will love more and more until everything around you is love. Love yourself now, exactly as sad and scared and flawed as you are, and you will grow up and live a rich life and show up for other people, and you’ll know exactly how big that is.

Let’s celebrate this moment together. There are twinklings and twinges, right here, in this moment. It is enough. Let’s find the eastern towhee.”
― Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life

“But what thrilled me most was the fact that millions of meteors burn up every day as they enter our atmosphere. As a result, Earth receives ten tons of dust from outer space. Not only do we take in the world with each breath, we are inhaling the universe. We are made of stardust.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“Silence introduced in a society that worships noise is like the Moon exposing the night. Behind darkness is our fear. Within silence our voice dwells. What is required from both is that we be still. We focus. We listen. We see and we hear. The unexpected emerges.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“Unexpressed emotion will be expressed somewhere, somehow, inside or out, most cruelly as unconscious aggression delivered with a smile or a poisonous cup of tea”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not aw a secret, but as a prayer.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“The world is already split open, and it is in our destiny to heal it, each in our own way, each in our own time, with the gifts that are ours.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“Yet, it's precisely within the contour of one's shame that one is summoned to wholeness.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“As misshapen as we feel ourselves to be, attention from another reminds us of our true shape in God.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“We have a chance, sometimes, to create a new jurisdiction, a place of astonishing mutuality, whenever we close both eyes of judgement and open the other eye to pay attention. Reminding each other how acceptable we are and lavishly providing free refills and all the Tapatio you need. Suddenly, we find ourselves in the same room with each other and the walls are gone.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“It's about "appearing," remembering that we belong to one another, and letting souls feel their worth.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings; it's a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Wendell explains that my pain feels like it's in the present, but it's actually both in the past and the future. Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present- how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don't accept the notion that there's no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, out pasts will keep us stuck. Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Therapy is hard work- and not just for the therapist. That's because the responsibility for change lies squarely with the patient. If you expect an hour of sympathetic head-nodding, you've come to the wrong place. Therapists will be supportive, but our support is for your growth, not for your low opinion of your partner. (Our role is to understand your perspective but not necessarily to endorse it.) In therapy, you'll be asked to be both accountable and vulnerable. Rather than steering people straight to the heart of the problem, we nudge them to arrive there on their own, because the most powerful truths- the ones people take most seriously- are those that they come to, little by little, on their own. Implicit in the therapeutic contract is the patient's willingness to tolerate discomfort, because some discomfort is unavoidable for the process to be effective.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed