Cynthia

“Eventually you will be all alone with doctors shrugging because they’ve run out of things to do, and the person you really are thumping frantically in your chest: the successes and catastrophes and affairs and hangovers and genuine loves and small betrayals and flashes of courage and the river of fear running beneath it all, and of course the vast stretches of wasted time that are part of even the most amazing life.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“whatever your lies are, digging through them will eventually take you to the center of your inferno. There you’ll encounter three major aspects of your own psyche: the monster, the betrayer, and the betrayed.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“Like every other mother in the history of time, I wondered if I would ever be able to love another child as much as I loved her.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“You will know yourself best at that moment; you will be at your most real, your most honest, your most uncalculated. If you could travel back in time to make use of such knowledge during your life, you would become exactly the person you’d always hoped to be—but none of us do that. We don’t get that knowledge until it’s too late because then it can’t be tainted by vanity or pride or desire.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife