Happy After All Quotes

“You’ll survive. You’ll keep on living. You’ll smile again. You’ll dream again. You get to be my age, and you realize that you had everything that was meant for you. So you might as well want it all, then see what comes.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“have known love. Great and deep and terrible. Beautiful, destructive. Self-sacrificial. Selfish, sometimes. I’ve lived so many lives all in one. It is a life’s work to look back on all your years and see that what you are, what you felt, what you experienced, was enough all along. Even now, here I am. With you. Here, in this place. It’s new. Even at ninety-five, there are still new people and places to see and be in. Believe me, my girl. I know”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“guess I should be glad I can look at her sad lawn, and her dilapidated house, and I can recognize what it means to not be a mother. I can recognize what I don’t want. I . . . I was so lucky last night to get to sit and talk to Alice and Gladys.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“I’m very good at running, Nathan. The thing about running is it’s not closure. It’s just leaving things behind. But if you run too fast, you leave the door open, and all kinds of shit follows you. Whether you mean it to or not.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“that life is made up of pain and loss. That the happy endings happen between the unbearable.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“Nathan, I feel a lot of empathy for you. I care very deeply about what happened to you. It doesn’t make my grief worse, though. I’m not scared of your grief either. I’ve already felt the worst . . . the most hopeless, dark feeling that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I get why people can’t handle it when they haven’t experienced that. Because they don’t want to know. They don’t want to know what you can go through and survive. They don’t want to know how horrible it can be. The stuff you have to keep on living with. But I already know. You’re not traumatizing me. Life did that already.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“Anger”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“I couldn’t find myself there. Because everything around me was still trying to be the way it was before. I wasn’t the same, though. I couldn’t be.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“The stuff with my mother, it hurts, but I’ve accepted that about her. For the most part. I remind myself of that. My mother being a narcissist has nothing to do with how important I am. It’s just that nothing can ever be as important to her as she is. A”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“But I’ve learned that you can do things you aren’t suited to, and you can do things you don’t like. You can even become great at them. Even if it never really fits.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“I don’t want to feel broken. I don’t want to feel like something less than the woman he wanted before he knew the truth.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“The people who only want you when you bend and twist to suit them don’t stay anyway, and the ones who want you as you are settle in, and so do you.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“I can remember clearly one of my friends saying to me afterward that she would never have been able to be as strong as I was. It didn’t feel like a compliment, even though I knew she meant it as one. I had no choice but to keep breathing. To keep going. I didn’t feel strong; I felt weak and broken. I still do. That’s the real tragedy of it. You go on.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“It’s hard. I feel like right now I’m happy. Right now things are good. I wish they didn’t need to change, but I also think they do.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“It’s a strange thing. I’m emotionally compromised, but I’m also so physically exhausted that it’s difficult for me to sort through the hierarchy of needs here.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“I also know that grief goes in waves. That sometimes the tide rolls out and you can see all these beautiful things left behind. Sea glass and seashells on the seashore. That sometimes the waves come back in hard and leave you breathless, drowning. That sometimes you’re blindsided by the realization of just how far away you are from the life you were supposed to have.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“Don’t postpone joy. I was in pain, and I had every reason to wait until I healed to start enjoying sunsets and pie and new friends. I took it as a sign from the universe. To try to let the joy exist alongside grief.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“hand is pressed to”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“You are in my blood. You are in my breath. You’re in my heart,”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“There is nothing wrong with me.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“Endings move on a continuum. One thing ends, something else begins.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“Don’t postpone joy.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“Human hearts are absurd,”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“I’m never going to get tired of hearing him say my name.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“I took it as a sign from the universe. To try to let the joy exist alongside grief.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“Two young trees who bent around each other as they grew. Well, I’m a mighty oak now, Amelia. And I can’t bend. Not again. Not for anyone else.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“Falling in love when everything is terrible is as brave an act as blowing shit up. Except it’s something regular, everyday people can choose to do. A radical act of real-life bravery.”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All

“But all my siblings are half siblings, and I’m like some odd mouse out,”
― Maisey Yates, Happy After All