Caroline

“You may be born into a family, but you walk into friendships. Some you’ll discover you should put behind you. Others are worth every risk.”
― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End

“I wish I wasn't such a dreamer. I've ruined this life for myself.”
― N.M. Sanchez, Initial Meeting

“A friend took me to the most amazing place the other day. It's called the Augusteum. Octavian Augustus built it to house his remains. When the barbarians came they trashed it a long with everything else. The great Augustus, Rome's first true great emperor. How could he have imagined that Rome, the whole world as far as he was concerned, would be in ruins. It's one of the quietest, loneliest places in Rome. The city has grown up around it over the centuries. It feels like a precious wound, a heartbreak you won't let go of because it hurts too good. We all want things to stay the same. Settle for living in misery because we're afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins. Then I looked at around to this place, at the chaos it has endured - the way it has been adapted, burned, pillaged and found a way to build itself back up again. And I was reassured, maybe my life hasn't been so chaotic, it's just the world that is, and the real trap is getting attached to any of it. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“There is nothing that you can do to win someone or something that is not meant to be yours. You can fight with everything you have. You can hold on for as long as you can. You can force yourself into mental gymnastics to pick apart signs. You can have your friends read into texts and emails. You can decide that you know what’s best for you and right for you. Mostly, you can wait. You can wait forever. What isn’t right for you will never remain in your life. There is no job, person, or city that you can force to be right for you if it is not, though you can pretend for a while. You can play games with yourself, you can justify and make ultimatums. You can say you’ll try just a little longer, and you can make excuses for why things aren’t working out right now. The truth is that what is right for you will come to you and stay with you and won’t stray from you for long. The truth is that when something is right for you, it brings you clarity, and when something is wrong for you, it brings you confusion. You get stuck when you try to make something that’s wrong for you right. When you try to force it into a place in your life in which it doesn’t belong. You get split; you breed this internal conflict which you cannot resolve. The more it intensifies, the more you mistake it for passion. How could you ever feel so strongly about something that isn’t right?”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery