Hal said we begin at the end.
So where are we now?
I‘m not sure it matters.
Wherever it is, I hope we can stay here a little longer.
🪦🐎🖤

You cannot trust perception. Falling, at first, feels like flying 🦋
—
Just then, the sun breaks over the tree line, setting the trees aflame. It is the kind of art that no master could ever capture on canvas, but it‘s here for the viewing every single day 🌅

…some stories had a way of getting stuck inside our heads. Usually, because we were afraid of what those stories revealed about us—our fears and our inadequacies, our mistakes and our failures. Sometimes, those stories needed a little nudging to come out 🕶

She felt something she had assumed she would never feel again: the thrill of a new beginning 👀

The funny thing about a picture is that while it knows everything that‘s happened up until the moment it‘s been taken, it knows absotively nothing about what happens next. And yet, once the picture has been framed and hung on the wall, what you see when you look closely are all the things that were about to happen. All the un-things. The things that were unanticipated. And unintended. And unreversible 🖼

The library. Books held the answer to every question.

Books had always been her solace; novels gave her space to be bold, brave, beautiful, if only in her own imagination.

📖📚📖📚

Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of gravity. Emotions also seem to act according to gravity. When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out 🪑☕️

Don‘t take things so serious. Learn to make and take a joke, ‘cause if you don‘t, it‘s going to be an awful dreary life for you 👭
.
Tomorrow—next month—next year. Everything was always going to be better in the future. And suddenly the future had come. It was a brief present. Too soon it would merge into a past to be remembered ⏳

Now I only dream about your father sometimes, instead of every night. And I dream about you even less. I cringe to write that, but it‘s true. I didn‘t think I‘d feel guilty for healing. But I guess, in some ways, I do 🎹💭

It‘s easy to fall in love with someone when you need them, but that doesn‘t make it real or right. I don‘t think how we were in our time together is how we‘d always be. There‘s a way you hold yourself in when love and need get tangled. It‘s hard to know what would last and what would wear too thin to keep 🛣🎶👶

I don‘t know how other people do it, not stay with the girl whose ankle socks made your stomach flip at age fourteen, whose wet hair smells like your past—the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to happiness 👩‍❤️‍👨
•
Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss 🌚

…telling me how he dreamt of kites — a whole sky full of kites, and he was holding all the strings. He told me how the good kites and wicked kites got all mixed up, how he tried to hold on to the good and let the rest float away, but after a while he couldn‘t tell them apart 🪁

Love wasn‘t a thing you fell in, but rose to. It was what stopped you from falling 🖤

It‘s never a forgone conclusion that anyone is actually going to see your work, no matter how good it is. And if nobody reads it, it doesn‘t exist 📝

You can choose the right shot, you can have a good swing and good technique, you can do everything right, and it can still go wrong. No player, no matter how good, makes one hundred percent of their shots 🎾🏆🍎

When someone‘s taken from you too soon, there‘s a finite number of things you can share with that person, so you want to share them all 🥀

Innocence, once lost, can never be regained. Darkness, once gazed upon, can never be lost 🌘
•
When a monster is finally caught against all odds, it feels like magic 🩸🧬⚖️

You push stuff away that isn‘t safe and obvious, but love isn‘t safe and obvious. Love is risky. Take the risk, woman 🖤

The guilt. So much guilt. Sonia feels guilty about what she‘s done, what she hasn‘t done, whom she has helped, and whom she hasn‘t. She feels guilty about the hours she works and the hours she doesn‘t🌿🥛☠️

My favorites 2021 reads! I had two reading goals this year — read 70 books and focus less on reading new releases and more on books I want to read, regardless of publication date. I didn‘t meet my goal of 70 books (too many distractions, both good and bad) coming up rather short at 43 books, but I am happy to highlight multiple non-new releases as my favorites this year 📖📚

Here‘s to making more time for reading in 2022 ✨

Stories belong to the victors. In the end, that‘s what everyone‘s fighting for—the chance to tell the story of what happened, no matter what actually did 🌲🍄🪵

You‘d be surprised what a kid can find it unimaginable to say 💔
•
First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl‘s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent 🗣

The library felt too good to be true. All those books, on all those shelves, and I could just pluck them out, one by one, find an empty chair, and read, and read, and read 📖📚

Whatever happens, if you love someone and know you‘re loved back, you will always have that 📰🪖♥️

Libraries are for all readers 📚

#history #library #libraries

Real life, mercifully isn‘t a thriller. My life is nothing but small moments, and so is yours. We don‘t live in a series of plot points. We should be thankful for that. We should realize how lucky we are 🏡💻🧑‍🦼

The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active…and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her 🍜🥟🍵

Past is past…no it‘s not! People are always fond of saying that, but what‘s past is never past; not entirely 🕰🚙

Some things you can‘t fix; some things you just have to carry 💔

It didn‘t take long to understand that there was no recipe or equation. Parenting was a river of moment-by-moment decisions, intuitions, a balancing of one‘s own needs, which did factor somehow, with those of the child. But mostly it was being there, truly there, with all your senses. Trusting the heart knowledge that arises with full attention. Lorrie had that. She had a gift for attention of the heart 🤰💛🤱

Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse —we can‘t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing 🕰💭

She thought that the worst part was not that Duncan had taken her heart…The worst part was that she‘d given it to him. Yes, that was always the worst part. You gave it to him. You carved out a crucial little part of yourself, and you not only gave it to him, you begged him to take it. You were sure at that moment that you would always have an endless supply, or at least more than enough. So you gave it to him 🪴🌤

Robbie wanted to make them laugh, wanted to help them see how good it was to all be together. There was too much you couldn‘t control in life, too many terrible things. They should be happy, even if only for a little while, even if just for right now 🌾

Family didn‘t mean hiding the hard stuff from each other, it meant facing it together. And it meant forgiving each other ☘️💚

…sometimes you find your way to the place that wants you most ✈️🗺

You don‘t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don‘t have it. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can‘t understand words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren‘t always the most reliable 🗣
•
Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love‘s first mistake. Perhaps love‘s only mistake 🖤⏳

It‘s hard to believe that nature can be so brutally violent 🌬🏥❄️

Like most girls my age, the sum total of my knowledge of what to do in a Manhattan bar came from watching reruns of Sex in the City 👗👠🌃

If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us, he said, then there wouldn‘t be so much fuss about love in the first place 🏙

I have hoped; I am hoping; I will hope 💙

They had taught her that family is found, that whether it be blood or circumstance or choice, what binds us does not matter. All that matters is that we are bound 🌅

I don‘t bail often, and I really wanted to like this one. But 150 pages in and it wasn‘t holding my attention, I found myself doing everything but reading 😕

Life‘s too short and there are too many books to force myself to finish the ones I‘m not enjoying.

It‘s only when you grow up that you learn you can love what‘s ugly too🪞

I want him to be joyful, loved, adored, full of everything, all the time ♥️📚💋

Every life has secrets. Every marriage certainly does. It‘s just a matter of whether you can live with them or not. 🏡🤫❤️‍🩹

…but she liked being part of an us. People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else 👩🏿‍🤝‍👩🏼

But it bothered him that he didn‘t recognize his own son, a young man halfway through high school, and it was then that Pat knew his anguish wasn‘t that he was going, but that he had already missed so much 🥃📝✈️

Maybe the world could do with more accidents 🥸

This is what it is to love a place. You have to want it to be better 📚👩‍🎓🏫

...we are more than just our genes. We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us—the people we‘re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later. Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us 🧬🔬🖤

People always think that happiness is a faraway thing, something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains—a cup of strong hot coffee when you‘re blue; a book to read when you‘re alone—just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness
☕️📚🌳☺️