2. “When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.”
3. “I have met myself and I am going to care for her fiercely.”
4. “This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.”
5. “The only meaningful thing we can offer one another is love.”
6. “Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world. Look! Love was once mine. I love it. Here is my proof that I paid the price.”
7. “Wherever you go, there you are. Your emptiness goes with you.”
8. “Your river is strong. Let it flow.”
9. “The truest, most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one.”
10. “When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don’t try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power.”
11. “Blessed are those brave enough to make things awkward, for they wake us up and move us forward.”
12. “Bring all of yourself to life. And if you’re told you’re ‘too much,’ smile and think—maybe. Or maybe their capacity is too small?”
13. “We only control what we don’t trust.”
14. “Love is the opposite of control. Love demands trust.”
15. “Every beautiful thing in life comes out of the mess.”
16. “I think one of the keys to happiness is accepting that I am never going to be perfectly happy.”
17. “The braver I am, the luckier I get.”
18. “Self-love means that I have a relationship with myself built on trust and loyalty.”
19. “I’m not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world.”
20. “It’s okay to feel all of the stuff you’re feeling. You’re just becoming human again.”
21. “Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.”
22. “People who need help sometimes look a lot like people who don’t need help.”
23. “We can either control ourselves or love ourselves, but we can’t do both.”
24. “We can choose to be perfect and admired or to be real and loved.”
25. “We know we must decide whether to stay small, quiet, and uncomplicated or allow ourselves to grow as big, loud, and complex as we were made to be.”
26. “What if pain—like love—is just a place where brave people visit?”
27. “The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me.”
28. “Life is a conversation. Make it a good one.”
29. “You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.”
30. “It’s nearly impossible to blaze one’s own path while following in someone else’s footsteps.”
31. “There is always more on its way. More opportunities, more ideas, more love. Know that there is enough. Know that you are enough. Know that you have enough.”
32. “Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyway.”
33. “The sun shows up every morning, no matter how bad you’ve been the night before. It shines without judgment. It never withholds.”
34. “These things will be hard, but you can do hard things.”
35. “Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right.”
36. “If you feel something calling you to dance or write or paint or sing, please refuse to worry about whether you’re good enough. Just do it.”
37. “Healing is not the reward for those who love the most or best.”
38. “I think sexy is a grown-up word to describe a person who’s confident that she is already exactly who she was made to be.”
39. “Sometimes the rewards of risk don’t leave us wrecked. Sometimes we find our passion, our purpose, courage, connection, and comfort. Every good thing in our lives is a direct result of risk.”
40. “You can never get enough of what you don’t need.”
41. “It’s okay to feel too much and know too little.”
42. “We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous.”
43. “Hard work is important. So are play and unproductivity. My worth is tied not to my productivity but to my existence. I am worthy of rest.”
44. “People will like me or not, but being liked is not my one thing—integrity is.”
45. “Every life is an unprecedented experiment.”
46. “You are here to decide if your life, relationships, and world are true and beautiful enough for you.”
47. “Life is hard—not because we’re doing it wrong, just because it’s hard.”
48. “If you are uncomfortable—in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused—you don’t have a problem, you have a life.”
49. “Life has valleys and mountains and the people who won’t let themselves experience the agony of being in the valley also don’t get to experience the ecstasy of the mountains.”
50. “Life is a quest to find an unfindable thing. We are put here needing something that doesn’t exist here.”
51. “Life is brutal, but it’s also beautiful. Life is Brutiful.”
52. “We are at war with our bodies, our minds, our souls.”
53. “The secret of life is not about knowing what to say or do. It’s not about doing love or loss right. Life cannot be handled. The secret is simply to show up. It’s about witnessing it all, even the pain, and letting it touch you and make you not harder, but more tender.”
54. “If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths.”
55. “If no pain, then no love. If no darkness, no light. If no risk, then no reward. It’s all or nothing. In this damn world, it’s all or nothing.”
56. “Because once we feel, know, and dare to imagine more for ourselves, we cannot unfeel, unknow, or unimagine. There is no going back.”
57. “We forgot how to know when we learned how to please.”
58. “Trusting people is terrifying. Maybe if love is not a little scary and out of our control, then it is not love at all.”
59. “When people express opinions that differ from yours, take it as a chance to grow. Seek to understand over being understood. Be curious, not defensive. The only way to disarm another human being is by listening.”
60. “Be careful with the stories you tell about yourself.”
61. “A boundary is the edge of one of our root beliefs about ourselves and the world.”
62. “Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you’re there because you hit a triple. Malicious privilege is complaining that those starving outside the ballpark aren’t waiting patiently enough.”
63. “Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it.”
64. “Freedom is not being for or against an ideal, but creating your own existence from scratch.”
65. “I cannot be in the moment because I am too afraid of what the next moment will bring. I have to be ready.”
66. “We are so afraid of dying. Also of living.”
67. “Every truth is a kindness, even if it makes others uncomfortable. Every untruth is unkindness, even if it makes others comfortable.”
68. “We all want purpose and connection. Tell me what breaks your heart, and I’ll point you toward both.”
69. “My courage will come from knowing I can handle whatever I encounter there—because I was designed by my creator to not only survive pain and love but also to become whole inside it. I was born to do this. I am a Warrior.”
70. “I used to numb my feelings and hide. Now I feel my feelings and share.”
71. “Since brokenness is the way of folks, the only way to live peacefully is to forgive everyone constantly, including yourself.”
72. “I learned that I need to move toward the pain. Pain doesn’t go away. If you don’t embrace it, it will be passed onto someone else, usually those around you.”
73. “Reading is my inhale and writing is my exhale.”
74. “I have learned that if I want to rise, I have to sink first.”
75. “That’s how you can tell that you’re filling yourself with the wrong things. You use a lot of energy, and in the end, you feel emptier and less comfortable than ever.”
76. “Progress through something traumatic, it’s not linear. It’s not like we go from unhealthy to healthy, failure to success. I think it’s all circular. You just come back around to the same pain and the same loneliness. But each time you come around, you’re stronger from the climb.”
77. “Maybe the yes comes before the readiness. Maybe you say yes and then you become equipped to handle whatever is about to happen.”
78. “We have to get back into our own bodies and figure out what the hell we want to do. And then the next step is doing it without explaining ourselves.”
79. “I decided that if I kept doing the ‘right’ thing, I would spend my life following someone else’s directions instead of my own.”
80. “Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge new.”
81. “Grief and pain are like joy and peace, they are not things we should try to snatch from each other.”
82. “If there’s a silver lining to the emptiness, here it is—the unfillable is what brings people together. I’ve never made a friend by bragging about my strengths, but I’ve made countless by sharing my weakness and my emptiness.”
83. “People who are hurting don’t need avoiders, protectors, or fixers. What we need are patient, loving witnesses. People sit quietly and hold space for us. People stand in helpful vigil to our pain.”
84. “I see your pain and it is difficult and it is hard, but it was made just for you and I also see that your courage is greater than your fear.”
85. “The change that happens to people who really sit in their pain. Whether it’s a sliver of envy lasting an hour or a canyon of grief lasting decades—it’s revolutionary.”
86. “Grief shatters. If you let yourself shatter and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled.”
87. “There is another kind of pain that comes not from losing beautiful things but from never even trying for them.”
88. “I wondered if joy had as much to teach me as pain did. If so, I wanted to know.”
89. “The anxiety that makes it difficult to exist in my own skin also makes it difficult to exist in a world where so many people are in so much pain and that makes me a relentless activist.”
90. “Despair says, ‘The heartbreak is too overwhelming. I am too sad and too small, and the world is too big. I cannot do it all, so I will do nothing.'”
91. “When grief rings. Surrender. There is nothing else to do. The delivery is an utter transformation.”
92. “What if in skipping the pain, I was missing my lessons?”
93. “It turned out that what I needed most was inside the one place I’d been running from my entire life—pain.”
94. “We don’t understand why we hurt those we love.”
95. “No woman on earth doesn’t give a fuck—no woman is that cool—she’s just hidden her fire. Likely, it’s burning her up.”
96. “The deep desires of women are precious. They are magic that has the capacity to lift every person to their greatest, most loving potential.”
97. “What I want to be, girls, is beautiful. Beautiful means ‘full of beauty.’ Beautiful is not about how you look on the outside. Beautiful is about what you’re made of.”
98. “I just think there are as many different versions of feminism as there are women.”
99. “Rebellion is as much of a cage as obedience is. They both mean living in reaction to someone else’s way instead of forging your own.”
100. “Every girl must decide whether to be true to herself or true to the world. Every girl must decide whether to settle for adoration or fight for love.”
101. “The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely. That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.”
102. “The blueprints of heaven are etched in the deep desires of women.”
103. “Maybe Eve was never meant to be our warning. Maybe she was meant to be our model. Own your wanting. Eat the apple. Let it burn.”
104. “Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one.”
105. “Feminism has to be defined as freedom.”
106. “I became a writer so I could stay at home alone in my pajamas, reading and writing about the importance of human connection and community. It is an almost perfect existence.”
107. “Every time you pretend to be less than you are, you steal permission from other women to exist fully.”
108. “Why does a woman’s neutral face mean anger, while a man’s neutral face means neutral?”
109. “The most revolutionary thing a woman can do—the next right thing, one thing at a time, without asking permission or offering explanation.”
110. “Nobody’s secure, and nobody feels like she completely belongs. Those insecurities are just job hazards of being human. But some people dance anyway, and those people have more fun.”
111. “God approaches us in the disguise of other people.”
112. “We and we are betrayed. We lie and we are lied to.”
113. “Judgment is self-abandonment.”
114. “Nobody is more ready to show up than anybody else. It’s just that some people show up before they’re perfect and before they’re ready.”
115. “Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else.”
116. “I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy.”
117. “In response to the world’s problems, it is easy to choose silence.”
118. “I think we are only bitter about other people’s joy in direct proportion to our commitment to keep joy from ourselves.”
119. “Faith is not a club to belong to, but a current to surrender to.”
120. “The facts were right there in front of me to see. But the truth was right there inside of me to feel.”
121. “Having something to say and no one to hear it is so lonely.”
122. “I feel like I numbed my feelings for so long because I felt like I couldn’t handle them. I left like the pain would be too much and the beauty would be too much. I learned to be fully present with the areas of my life that are brutal and the areas that are beautiful. It feels like, I am doing this human thing.”
123. “All the devil has to do to win is convince you he’s God.”
124. “To me, faith is not a public allegiance to a set of outer beliefs, but a private surrender to the inner knowing.”
125. “The journey is learning that pain, like love, is simply something to surrender to. It’s a holy space we can enter with people only if we promise not to tidy up.”
126. “My purpose is clearer today than it has been in years—love, courage, truth.”
127. “We think our job as humans is to avoid pain, our job as parents is to protect our children from pain, and our job as friends is to fix each other’s pain. Maybe that’s why we all feel like failures so often because we all have the wrong job description for love.”
128. “Maybe there is no way for love to fail because the eventual result of all love is new life.”
129. “Loving fiercely and grieving deeply are often two halves of the same whole.”
130. “I could imagine the kind of love in which I was fully seen, known, and cherished.”
131. “I think the way to get to any place worth going and any person worth knowing is love. Keep it simple today. I love you.”
132. “Nothing you can ever do will make me love you more, and nothing you can ever do will make me love you less.”
133. “Because love is not something for which to search or wait or hope or dream. It’s simply something to do.”
134. “It’s not. I love you no matter which of my expectations you meet or don’t meet. It’s my only expectation is that you become yourself. The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.”
135. “Love casts out fear. A woman who has recovered her true identity as a love is the most powerful force on earth. All the darkness and shame and pain in the world can’t defeat her.”
136. “They look because she’s lovely but they stare because she is love.”
137. “I have decided that I want to be in love with a person, not a feeling. I want to be found in love, not lost in it. I’d rather exist than disappear.”
138. “Love is not a victory march. It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”
139. “I think I love my people more than normal people love their people. My love is so overwhelming and terrifying and uncomfortable and complicated that I need to hide from it.”
140. “To be brave is to forsake all others to be true to yourself.”
141. “Brave is not something you should wait to feel. Brave is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear than fitting in, than following the crowd.”
142. “Just show up, be brave, be kind, rest, try again.”
143. “The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It’s not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine.”
144. “Brave means living from the inside out. Brave means, in every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the knowing, and speaking it out loud.”
145. “My children do not need me to save them. My children need to watch me save myself.”
146. “Sister each other, because sistering is the best part of life.”
147. “A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter.”
148. “There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.”
149. “Stop making parenthood harder by pretending it’s not hard.”
150. “Expecting less than true friendship in my most important relationship is so depressing.”
151. “Since the day I decided to become sober and a mother, I’ve been trying to become who I am supposed to be.”
152. “Who else but a sibling travels with you from the start of life’s path to the bitter end?”
153. “In all my close friendships, words are the bricks I use to build bridges. To know someone I need to hear her, and to feel known, I need to be heard by her. The process of knowing and loving another person happens for me through conversation.”
154. “What if the call of motherhood is not to be a martyr but to be a model?”
155. “Courage says, ‘I will not let the fact that I cannot do everything keep me from doing what I can.’”
156. “His body fills my arms and I think, ‘Oh. So this is what my arms are for.’”
157. “The thing that gets me thinking and questioning most deeply is a leader who warns me not to think or question.”
158. “If I want my world to be less vicious, then I must become more gentle.”
159. “Service and art are the two things that have saved me.”
160. “Love, listen to me—the wounded become the healers. Your pain will not be wasted. Trust it. Be brave enough to be still in it and you’ll learn that your pain will not consume you. It will become the fire you burn to light and warm the world.”
161. “Don’t let yourself become so concerned with raising a good kid that you forget you already have one.”
162. “I’m willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself.”
163. “We ask if our ideas make sense instead of assuming they do.”
164. “Our judgment is self-protection. It’s a cage we put around ourselves. We hope it will keep danger out, but it only keeps tenderness and empathy from coming in.”
165. “Love is kind, right? It’s not about calling someone out on every little thing you feel.”
166. “Numbness keeps us from becoming.”
167. “You can’t lose people who never even found you.”
168. “It is wild to let others be wild.”
169. “A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.”
170. “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
171. “To me, intimacy is about communication. Through the written or spoken or physically expressed word, communicating is how we get into each other’s hearts and minds.”
172. “It’s not the cruel criticism from folks who hate us that scares us away from our knowing, it’s the quiet concern of those who love us.”
173. “Kind people are brave people.”
174. “Being fully human is not about feeling happy, it’s about feeling everything.”
175. “So what is it in a human life that creates bravery, kindness, wisdom, and resilience? What if it’s pain? What if it’s a struggle?”
176. “I have to search for and depend upon the voice of inner wisdom instead of voices of outer approval.”
177. “Addiction is a hiding place where sensitive people go. I was a super-sensitive kid—addiction is where I went to hide from risk, to hide from pain, to hide from love.”
178. “You are not crazy. You are a goddamn cheetah.”
179. “If our goal is to be tolerant of people who are different than we are, then we really are aiming quite low. Traffic jams are to be tolerated. People are to be celebrated.”