“Sometimes, we do things that are bad for us in an effort to cope with problems.”

“You start out every day with something new and different, and sometimes it looks pretty good and sometimes it doesn't, but you have to go through it anyway.”

“At some point, hurting myself has gone past the need to be in control. It's routine now. An addiction. I cannot cope without it, and when things get bad, the need to feed the habit flares.”

“I suppose this is what I meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.”

“Can any of us pinpoint the moment when we've lost our younger selves, lost joy in the simple things, stopped celebrating life? For years-decades-we work, raise a family, plant begonias. Then one day we wake up to chemotherapy and eulogies and nursing home visits and the realization that we haven't had a real vacation in years. And all we can do is ask: how did life get so hard?”

“…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.”

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”