I Miss You When I Blink Quotes

“Maybe we all walk around assuming everyone is interpreting the world the same way we are, and being surprised when they aren't, and that's the loneliness and confusion of the human experience in a nutshell.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“But maybe the trick isn't sticking everything out. The trick is quitting the right thing at the right time. The trick is understanding that saying "No, thank you" to something you're expected to accept isn't failure. It's a whole other level of success.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“What a job, to raise someone from birth to adulthood, bestowing upon them your knowledge and your values and, despite your best intentions, any number of traits you've inherited yourself. What a loaded task, to make every move, every day, in such a way that the impressionable larva-person in your home will see your example, process it into something with herself, and grow layers of muscle and soul over it until she is a fully developed human being. And all the while, the little person you're nurturing is fighting you - spitting out the broccoli, not wearing the helmet, rolling her eyes at your carefully chosen words of advice - and you become constantly worn down even as you pour your energies into loving her.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Whether you think you know exactly who you'll become or have absolutely no idea, I tell them, one this is true for everyone, for better or for worse: Life will surprise you. You'll hit dead-ends and detours. There will be times when you can't fathom what comes next. When that happens, remember yourself as you are right now. Remember yourself as you were when you were even younger. Who were you when you weren't wondering who you were?”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“A good quit feels powerful. Deciding what you won’t have in your life is as important as deciding what you will have. Trying out something you expect to love, realizing you don’t really love it, and giving it back, that takes guts.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“When you internalize what you believe to be someone else's opinion of you, it becomes your opinion of you.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Over time, "I miss you when I blink" became another one of these phrases. It helps me live in the moment. It slows me down and makes me absorb each instant instead of rushing, because I know already how much I miss things that happened in the past-how they're right there behind my eyelids but also gone forever.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“I used to think that if only I could make everything perfect, then I could relax and have fun. If I could just eliminate all mistakes, my life would settle into place - click! - and my mind would rest. If I'm being truthful, I have to acknowledge that on some unchangeable, deep-down level, there's still a part of me that thinks that. I'm still a first grader at a spelling bee, thinking that what matters more than anything is that I get every word right.

But by now, I've built up a crowd of selves who can set that little girl at ease. It's okay, they tell her. Mistakes will happen - they have happened - and it's not the end of the world. They get her to loosen up a little bit. They help her see that doing things wrong is part of doing life right. They show her that joy is bigger than fear. It can even be funny when things go haywire.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Even if you deliberately choose to do a "wrong" thing, you're choosing it, which means you've picked it as the right thing to do.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Somewhere deep in my twisted little brain is the desire to be so good at so many things that I earn the chance to be multiple people. It seems so unfair that we only get to read the choose-your-own adventure book of our lives once, that we can't pick a point and go, "Okay, this time flip to page 102 and do the rest another way.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“I know that one day, I will look to my son—who was my baby five minutes ago, yes, he was—to carry me up the stairs, to drive me to doctor’s appointments, to help me when I spill something or can’t operate the sleeves of a sweater. He is already taller than me. He will be a man before I can blink. I feel this ahead of me on the timeline and I need to get in the time machine and go back. Please, I say to the universe. I can accept all this if you just let me go back sometimes. Let me nudge the edge of a sippy cup between his lips. Let me comb his matted little fluff of hair. Let me hold his wriggling torso between my knees and button his overalls at his shoulder before he bolts away. If I could just go back and forth. If it weren’t all or nothing.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote that “when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” Every despair in the world comes down to this, she believes. Every joy, too, I say. Because every joy will run out. And so will every life. And maybe that’s what I mourn as my children grow: the fact that they and I and we will one day not be here at all. No one’s getting out of here alive.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“None of us will be okay, in the end. The not-okay is coming for everyone... We act like there are safe places. We behave as though if we work hard and acquire the right things, gain the right access, put ourselves in the right zones, we can arrive someplace where danger can't touch us- where anything can't happen. We pretend that if we can identify someone else's loss as greater than our own, we won't lose. But nothing really guards our lives. Lifeguards don't exist.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“For so many people I know, there is no one big midlife smashup; there's a recurring sense of having met an impasse, a need to turn around and redo the way you are or else you'll lose your mind.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“And when I have anxiety attacks about the future—What if right now is the happiest I will ever be and I’m not appreciating it enough? Will I reach the end of my days having never lived in France or made enough people happy or learned everything there is to know about outer space or being able to do a split? Am I eating enough anti-oxidants? What will I be doing in ten years? In twenty?—I say I miss you when I blink to myself, and it means, Get a grip. Don’t panic. To figure out where to go next, look at where you came from. If you got here, you can get to the next thing.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Sometimes, in moments of memory or daydream, I feel the different iterations of myself pass by each other, as if right-now-me crosses paths with past-me or imaginary-me or even future-me in the hallways of my mind. "I miss you when I blink," one says. "I'm right here," says the other, and reaches out of hand.”
― 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

“I knew that one of the reasons we talked so much when we were younger was that we needed to figure out who we were and what we believed - we needed to hear it out loud, change it a little, hear it again. I knew time was at a premium and life was more complicated nowadays; there was less time available for talking. But didn't the very fact that life was more complicated now mean we had more to talk about, not less?”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Life will surprise you. You’ll hit dead-ends and detours. There will be times when you can’t fathom what comes next. When that happens, remember yourself as you are right now. Remember yourself as you were when you were even younger. Who were you when you weren’t wondering who you were?”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“friend of mine uses “not my circus, not my monkeys” a lot. It helps her ignore her instinct to get involved in things that aren’t her business, and it also makes her remember that people have all sorts of reasons for the things they do, many of which she’ll never understand. It’s useful for both behavior modification and acceptance.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“It takes courage to quit something, but often you get that courage back with dividends.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“My mind seeks the tidiness of a question answered. An agenda complete. A box checked. That's what harmony feels like in my brain. Wasted time and wrong answers disrupt that harmony like an off-key instrument making a dissonant clang in a musician's ears.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“I miss you when I blink. I have felt it so many times in my life, at points where I didn't really know who I was anymore, where I felt that when I closed my eyes, I could feel myself gone.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Deciding what you won't have in your life is as important as deciding what you will have. Trying out something you expect to love, realizing you don't really love it, and giving it back, that takes guts.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Who were you when you weren't wondering who you were?”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“I have felt it so many times in my life, at points where I didn't really know who I was anymore, where I felt that when I closed my eyes, I could feel myself gone.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“The picture you get at the end of a connect-the-dots activity really depends on which dots you decide to use. So try things and go through phases.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“The picture you get a the end of a connect-the-dots activity really depends on which dots you decide to use. So try thing and go through phases. Put down lots of dots. Later, you can look back and pick any of those dots to create a picture of how you became who you are. And if you don't like the picture you end up with, you can always choose different dots, which just goes to show destiny isn't all it's cracked up to be.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“She didn't look at her new routine like a failure to make her old routine work; she looked at it like a sensible solution. No big deal. You can just change things, I thought. What a concept.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“I wish I didn't have a to-do list in my peripheral vision at all times...My brain seeks tasks to check off, i's to dot and t's to cross.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays