Bean

“I used to think that happiness, like God, was an idea weaker people were sold on, to manage the grief of a world with so much suffering. It is just easier, I thought, to decide that you are doing something wrong and you just need to buy the right thing, read the right book, find the right guru, or pray more to be happy than to accept that life is a great long heartbreak. Happiness is not what I imagined that mirage to be: an unending ecstasy or state of perpetual excitement. Not a high or a mirage, it is just being okay. My happiness is the absence of fear that there won't be enough -- enough money, enough power, enough security, enough of a cushion of these things to protect me from the everyday heartbreaks of being human. Heartbreak doesn't kill you. It changes you.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“And I realize now that the two main themes of my novels were stated by my siblings: 'Here I am, cleaning shit off of practically everything' and 'No pain.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House