“Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soils. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories.” – Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
“I want to love you without clutching, appreciate you without judging, join you without invading, invite you without demanding, leave you without guilt, criticize you without blaming, and help you without insulting. If I can have the same from you, then we can truly meet and enrich each other.” – Virginia Satir
“I assure you, I am not put together at all. Nor am I broken. I am recovering – finding the beautiful in the ugly and stitching it into my life.” – Rachel Wolchin
“You will be stupid. You will worry your parents. You will question your own choices, your relationships, your jobs, your friends, where you live, what you studied in college, that you went to college at all… If that happens, you’re doing it right.” – Ira Glass
“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on this earth as though I had a right to be here.” – James Baldwin
“I am both worse and better than you thought.” – Sylvia Plath
“This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to realize it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.” – Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.” – Cheryl Strayed, excerpt from Tiny Beautiful Things
“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky
“Until you get comfortable with being alone, you’ll never know if you are choosing someone out of love or loneliness.” – Mandy Hale