Justine

“But here’s what Older Self will not have the heart to say: some of the music you are now listening to—the CDs you play while you stare out the window and think about the five million different ways your life might go—will be unbearable to listen to in twenty years. They will be unbearable not because they will sound dated and trite but because they will sound like the lining of your soul. They will take you straight back to the place you were in when you felt that anything could happen at any time, that your life was a huge room with a thousand doors, that your future was not only infinite but also elastic. They will be unbearable because they will remind you that at least half of the things you once planned for your future are now in the past and others got reabsorbed into your imagination before you could even think about acting on them. It will be as though you’d never thought of them in the first place, as if they were never”
― Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion

“But one person’s more-sad doesn’t cancel out another person’s less-sad. The fact that an earthquake took out a whole city block”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“You see yourself the way you think the world sees you, so you value yourself only when you are accomplishing and producing and finishing and succeeding. If you can’t value yourself, then there’s no reason to get up every morning, and if there’s no reason to get up, then . . . what? You feel untethered, as if someone has turned off gravity and you’ve been spun into infinite space, a black hole that demands, WHAT’S THE POINT OF YOU?”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“or furniture I wanted to buy or even people I was attracted to (well, I’m referring to those things a little) but, rather, a sensation I can only describe as the ache of not being there”
― Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion