Heather > Heather's Quotes

“I believe we have a choice in this world about how to tell sad stories , on the one hand , we can sugercoat it. Nothing is too messed up that can't be fixed with a Peter Gabriel song, I like this version as much as the next girl does. It's just not the truth”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“In his book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University, explores how trauma literally reshapes the brain and the body, and how interventions that enable adults to reclaim their lives must address the relationship between our emotional well-being and our bodies.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

“The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

“As Anne Lamott said, “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.” We have the tendency to visualize an entire scenario or conversation or outcome, and when things don’t go the way we’d imagined, disappointment can become resentment. This often happens when our expectations are based on outcomes we can’t control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

“When I see people stand fully in their truth, or when I see someone fall down, get back up, and say, “Damn. That really hurt, but this is important to me and I’m going in again”—my gut reaction is, “What a badass.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

“Of all the things trauma takes away from us, the worst is our willingness, or even our ability, to be vulnerable. There's a reclaiming that has to happen.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution

“It’s always helpful to remember that when perfectionism is driving, shame is riding shotgun.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

“Boundaries—You respect my boundaries, and when you’re not clear about what’s okay and not okay, you ask. You’re willing to say no. Reliability—You do what you say you’ll do. At work, this means staying aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t overpromise and are able to deliver on commitments and balance competing priorities. Accountability—You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends. Vault—You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share. I need to know that my confidences are kept, and that you’re not sharing with me any information about other people that should be confidential. Integrity—You choose courage over comfort. You choose what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy. And you choose to practice your values rather than simply professing them. Nonjudgment—I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment. Generosity—You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others. Self-trust is often a casualty”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

“failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Everyone on Earth, they'd tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many “angry black women” have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others. I wasn’t interested in slotting myself into a passive role, waiting for Barack’s team to give me direction.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“They aren’t “bad kids.” They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I objected anytime a student was automatically dismissed for having a B on a transcript or for having gone to a less prestigious undergraduate program. If we were serious about bringing in minority lawyers, I asserted, we’d have to look more holistically at candidates. We’d need to think about how they’d used whatever opportunities life had afforded them rather than measuring them simply by how far they’d made it up an elitist academic ladder. The point wasn’t to lower the firm’s high standards: It was to realize that by sticking with the most rigid and old-school way of evaluating a new lawyer’s potential, we were overlooking all sorts of people who could contribute to the firm’s success. We needed to interview more students, in other words, before writing them off.”
― Michelle Obama

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Confabulation has a really great and subtle definition: a Confabulation is a lie told honestly. To confabulate is to replace missing information with something false that we believe to be true.”
― Brené Brown, Dare to Lead

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone. The Christians in Holland are also living in fear because their sons are being sent to Germany. Everyone is scared. Every night hundreds of planes pass over Holland on their way to German cities, to sow their bombs on German soil. Every hour hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of people are being killed in Russia and Africa. No one can keep out of the conflict, the entire world is at war, and even though the Allies are doing better, the end is nowhere in sight.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl