Colleen Venette

“This is what I felt: the warm weight of his hands on me; the genuineness in his smile; the gentle heat of something opening, the way some flowers spread out in the morning at the sight of the sun. I knew what was happening. It was the unscarred piece of my heart. It was just big enough to let in a bit of affection. There was still a tiny bit of room left.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss. Katherine’s experience and her insight sit with me. She went through something she thought she could never survive and yet here she is, surviving. “You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,” she told me before bed. “That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“I realized then that the whole time I thought I'd been walking alone, my father had been with me. Supportin' me. Steadyin' me. Protectin' me, best he could. I knew I had to be strong enough to stand on my own two feet. I had to step out of my father's hands and pull myself up out of the mud. I thought I would be scared to walk the rest of my life without him, but I know I'll never really be without him because each step I take, I see his handprints in the footprints I leave behind.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“She was thinking about everything Ro had told her that night, the incomprehensible cruelties that terrible people are capable of inflicting on each other, and the utter insanity of war. Then she thought of how Ro, after all that, had somehow managed to grow up to be the sort of person who made other people laugh. Because her parents had taught her during their flight through the mountains that humor is the soul's last line of defense, and as long as we're laughing we're alive, so bad puns and fart jokes were their way of expressing their defiance against despair.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People