- “Your story is what
you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”
- “For every door
that’s been opened to me, I’ve tried to open my door to others. And here is
what I have to say, finally: Let’s invite one another in. Maybe then we can
begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases
and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the
ways we are the same. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about where you get
yourself in the end. There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard,
in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace
in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.”
- “Now I think it’s
one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to
be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become
something and that’s the end.”
- “If you don’t get
out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by
others.”
- “This may be the
fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you
on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there
for a long time.”
- “For me, becoming
isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as
forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a
better self. The journey doesn’t end.”
- “Everyone on Earth,
they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved
some tolerance.”
- “Failure is a
feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds
with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.”
- “Friendships
between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small
kindnesses… swapped back and forth and over again.”
- “It hurts to live
after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or
open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food
tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look
at something you’d otherwise find beautiful—a purple sky at sunset or a
playground full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so
lonely this way.”
- “Time, as far as my
father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.”
- “His money went
largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast
for his mind.”
- “Even if we didn’t
know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone
on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone
deserved some tolerance.”
- “I didn’t want them
ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We
didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.”
- “At fifty-four, I
am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.”
- “The lesson being
that in life you control what you can.”
- “I began to
understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing
to get yourself out of a stick place, I realized. It was another thing entirely
to try and get the place itself unstuck.”
- “Hearing them, I
realised that they weren’t all at smarter than the rest of us. They were simply
emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that
history had never told them anything different.”
- “I’ve learned that
it’s harder to hate up close.”
- “We live by the
paradigms we know.”
