No Happy Endings Quotes

“You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to. That’s what your heart is there for.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“Yes, we have all been broken before. And yes, we could break all over again. The years will roll on. More joy. More pain. More possibility. More yes. More and.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“It’s about facing whatever darkness looms over you: your suffering, your sorrow, your sickness, and still putting one foot in front of the other.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“Let’s all stop pretending that selfies are an aberration of the high art we’re creating with our smart phones or that posting a photo of yourself is somehow an interruption of the high-level discourse we are used to sharing on social media. You know what selfies can show you? Yourself. And you are worth looking at. You are worth marveling at.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“This is how I honor Aaron and my father: by making sure their deaths aren’t a black hole that sucked me in, but the spark I needed to be able to burn brighter.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“There is no choice we can make that will help us avoid heartache or suffering or loss, in some measure.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“Even if you’re surrounded by people you love, figuring out grief is a solo project.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“It feels as if all unexpected life events blow in all at once, like a summer storm that drops rocks of ice on your lawn on an eighty-degree day. That’s true of the hard things: they arrive with an exclamation mark, sudden and declarative.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“I wish I could tell my teenage self that loving once makes you better at loving, and better at being loved. That whatever happens with each love, you can carry it all proudly.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“I remember trying to explain it to you, and realizing that you had already glazed over and checked out, and I could have said “because one time I saw the face of Jesus in a hot dog and he told me that if I ate him I could have eternal life” and you wouldn’t have noticed. What I want to say to you now, is this: I believe in God now, but not because of Catechism. Not because of what someone told me, or an essay I had to write for credit. I believe in God because I see God every day. I see God in people. I feel God in people. God is not a disinterested Father. God is love. She is air. God is seeing you carry Ralph to the car after your soccer games, in the wrinkling of your baby brother’s nose when you make him smile, in the story of you covering your little sister’s ears so she didn’t hear your mom and dad fighting when you were both so little.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“right.Ninety-nine percent of the feedback you get—or fear getting—is of no consequence. There are worse things in life than not being liked, or trying something and failing, and one of them is complacency. A world where we receive zero criticism is a world where we are not contributing, where we are living at the very baseline of our abilities. It is a world where I am not doing the work that fuels me. It is a world where I am smaller for the comfort of others, and for my own safety.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“Ernest Hemingway wrote “the world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger in the broken places.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“I’m opinionated, obstinate, and obsessive. I am quick to anger, quick to cry, quick-witted and a slow runner. A very slow runner. I don’t know if you can really call it running, really. I don’t know what I want. Some heavy making out? Someone to text me for no reason? A person who is absolutely, positively in love with me? It varies, day by day. I know that I want you to play with my hair while we lay on the couch and listen to records. I want you to hold my hand while we’re driving and take out the trash before you’re ever asked. I want you to want me, but not need me. To be there for me without my asking, and to go away without being told. I want you to keep me company and keep your promises. PS: Please, don’t be shorter than me. Chapter Seven Finders Keepers”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“That is what I’ve felt like all of these months, like I am groping about in the darkness, waking up in a world I hadn’t expected to occupy. But there is no way through it except through it.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“It is completely bonkers that after we’ve had our heart put through a meat grinder, we just gather up the chunks and say, “Well, let’s try again!”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“Grief is a byproduct of love. We don’t grieve what we don’t love.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“Something inside me started to pull me toward people who had also experienced hard things. I lost my taste for fiction and I devoured memoirs, soaking up the experiences of people who lived and felt deeply.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“from the dangers of the entire world. You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to. That’s what your heart is there for.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“The change of three letters makes all the difference: in how that reads, in how it feels, in how it lives. Because but makes our hearts and possibilities so much smaller than they are. And is where it’s at. And is where I am now. And does not deny the past, or the pain. And makes room for it, in a way that but does not. And allows for the future, too. And makes room for the multitudes included in all our experiences.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“In the words of Amy Grant, it takes a little time, sometimes, to get the Titanic turned back around. That’s an unfortunate lyric, given the fate of the Titanic. And I think it’s also a poor excuse for complacency. Things change when people care enough to change them, and people can change, when they care to.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“the world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger in the broken places.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“This is how I honor Aaron and my father. By making sure that their deaths aren't a black hole that sucked me in. The spark I needed to be able to burn brighter.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“Our big love grew from a million, tiny considerations of one another.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“The first year of widowhood is a year of firsts. 365 days where you can say 'Last year, we were -' The blank is filled with everything from the monumental to the mundane.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“Somewhere between our youngest years and our oldest years, we learn to hide behind shoulds and woulds and coulds instead of feelings and facing what is.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“These shoulds that were so kindly offered to me assumed that chaos can be managed; that every problem has an answer; that tragedy can be managed if you just follow the plan of the should,”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“Don't should yourself. And don't let anyone should on you, either.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“This is life after life after life, in all of the chaos and contradiction of feelings and doings and beings involved. There will be unimaginable joy in incomprehensible tragedy. There will be endings. But there will be no happy endings.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“I couldn't talk about my happiness without touching on the uncomfortable truth that everything I have now is built on everything I lost.”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings

“BE “FINE” How are you? Well, you’re fine, of course! You’ve never been better. I mean, sure, those medical bills are adding up to more than your house is worth, and yeah, you’re not on “speaking terms” with your siblings, and no, you don’t exactly have a job, but overall? When you think of it? Ya can’t complain. Turn the conversation back onto the asker as soon as humanly possible. You’ll immediately find out that they’re just as fine as you are. Wild, right? 3. DI(ALL)Y Help? Who needs help? Not you. You can handle it. Totally. Whatever it is. Three hours in line at the Social Security office, only to find out that your form wasn’t notarized on the third day of the month with Saturn in your fifth house? Not a problem. Two kids with the stomach flu and a job that doesn’t give you paid sick time? You got this. A burning pit of despair growing stronger every day like the Eye of Sauron? All over it. Those cracks you’re starting to feel in that Totally Fine Construct you worked so hard on? That’s the breakdown coming. The cortisol is pumping, your blood pressure is banging, and your body, which doesn’t know the difference between emotional stress and being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger, is freaking the fudge out. Delicious, isn’t it? Don’t worry, there’s more where that came from!”
― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings