Rachel

“We tend to think of happiness (and by happiness I also mean health or overall well-being)as a gift, and sometimes it is, a pure gratuity. But most of the time it comes about because you've done the work, prepared the ground to allow it in or tended it carefully once it has arrived. You have to practice happiness the way you practice the piano, commit to it the way you commit to going to the gym.”
― Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

“That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
― Dorothy Parker

“I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.”
― Garrison Keillor, Love Me

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet