Josephine

“I was so absorbed in the things that I couldn’t change, I forgot the most important thing.”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

“They're doing just as I asked them to. As we Sinclairs always do. Pretending. Lying. Trying to have a good time.”
― E. Lockhart, Family of Liars

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“However stupid it was, there was a sore spot in my soul, a tiny hole through which my self-esteem was trickling away.”
― Mechthild Gläser, The Book Jumper