Nicole

“I stopped trying to tank sorrow, realized that the world has sorrow enough for all of us, and when some of it falls to you the best hope you have is letting yourself suffer through it. I suffered through it. I suffer through it.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” I like even more what Jesus doesn’t say. He does not say, “One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you’ll be light.” He doesn’t say “If you play by the rules, cross your T’s and dot your I’s, then maybe you’ll become light.” No. He says, straight out, “You are light.” It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it. So, for God’s sake, don’t move. No need to contort yourself to be anything other than who you are.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Time and again I've been in a group of people in their forties, fifties, and up who, when talk turns to aging, make the typical lamentations, but sometimes, later, softly, confess that they prefer their lives now, prefer themselves now. This secret is kept from those who need to hear it - the despairing young. Movies certainly don't spoil the secret - how rarely they present a middle-aged woman falling in love, for example, or living by herself in any kind of creative and productive way. What I want you to know: so far, it just gets better.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“By the time I walked down the aisle—or rather, into a judge’s chambers—I had lived fourteen independent years, early adult years that my mother had spent married. I had made friends and fallen out with friends, had moved in and out of apartments, had been hired, fired, promoted, and quit. I had had roommates I liked and roommates I didn’t like and I had lived on my own; I’d been on several forms of birth control and navigated a few serious medical questions; I’d paid my own bills and failed to pay my own bills; I’d fallen in love and fallen out of love and spent five consecutive years with nary a fling. I’d learned my way around new neighborhoods, felt scared and felt completely at home; I’d been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored. I was a grown-up: a reasonably complicated person. I’d become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself. I was not alone.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation