Gwen

“There’s a magnet that somebody stuck on the refrigerator in our office’s kitchen: PEACE. IT DOES NOT MEAN TO BE IN A PLACE WHERE THERE IS NO NOISE, TROUBLE, OR HARD WORK. IT MEANS TO BE IN THE MIDST OF THOSE THINGS AND STILL BE CALM IN YOUR HEART. We can help patients find peace, but maybe a different kind than they imagined they’d find when they started treatment. As the late psychotherapist John Weakland famously said, “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“It’s because you know that more is possible that you’ll always see the pointlessness in following a stupid rule or clocking in and out of a boring class. Most people can’t see that distinction, so they just do as they’re told. Of course, this makes them bored and irritated, but they think that’s the human condition. You and I are lucky enough to see that it doesn’t have to be that way.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Kind people are brave people. Brave is not something you should wait to feel. Brave is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd.”
― Glennon Melton, Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed

“See how the lights twinkle?” Patrick pointed at the horizon. He held on tight to Grant, who he imagined felt even further from Sara; Maisie, after all, had nine years with her mother, while her brother only had six. “They’re not actually flickering, not really. The lights themselves are static. It’s all the things we cannot see between us and them that make them shimmer. Atmospheric densities, dust, moisture, humidity, that sort of thing. I’m not really the expert. But all the invisible things. Like your mom, she’s one of them now, too. When she starts to feel far away, I like to imagine she’s not as far away as we might think. She’s right here between us and the lights.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle Abroad