Amanda Mays

“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

“He’s the sort of person who runs toward a fire. No hesitation, no questions, he just runs. People like that are rare, but you know who they are when you see them.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“I couldn't understand
why none of them
needed to say something
a million times
in their heart
before they spoke
it with their tongue.”
― Dante Medema, The Truth Project: A DNA test shatters Cordelia Koenig's senior project―and her family―in this gripping YA novel-in-verse about identity and lies