Carmen > Recent Status Updates

"You are not stupid, Nicky whispered fiercely in her ear. You're a rebel. And rebels are always misunderstood by their peers."
- page 257

"It was nothing, she told herself. Who cares that she had read one measly paragraph? But there was another, softer voice inside of her that was saying one word: miracle. A small one, granted, imperceptible to anyone but her, but a miracle nonetheless."
- page 261

"The concert was three hours of heaven, all of them scream-singing the words to every song along with thousands of other girls, lifted together on a tide of riotous, unapologetic joy, the feeling that to be a girl with other girls was not some weakness, as they had been told, but a power, the best and luckiest power on earth."
- page 219-220

"You can risk-assess, you can be cautious, you can make sensible decisions about who you choose to trust and invite into your life and heart. But you can't manage the unruly variables of another living, breathing human. Too choose to love is to take a risk. Always. That's why it's called falling – no one meanders-with-a-compass-and-Ordnance-Survey-map into love." - page 354

"The danger of a person like you doing therapy is that you seem clever," he said. "You will get the theory of it all very easily. You'll be able to be academic about yourself in conversation. But, you know, all the talky-talky stuff will only take you so far. You need to really feel it in your core, that change. It can't just be stuff you discuss with a therapist. You need to feel it in your body – " (...)
-page 267

(...)
Und doch
beweine ich lieber deine Abwesenheit und
dein Nicht-Dasein, dein – ich weiß nicht – Nicht-Sein.
Auch wenn ich Abwesenheiten nicht gerade liebe
– soll ich ganz ehrlich zu dir sein? –
gibt es keine Anwesenheit, die besser wäre.
(...)
-S.39

"Three days on the sofa? Haven't opened the curtains? Crying over difficult decisions like which pair of socks to wear? So what. No biggie. There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet."
- page 121

"And just stop worrying about worrying. Just worry - you can't help that - but don't meta-worry."
- page 110

"6. Minds have their own weather systems. You are in the hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on."
-page 112

"Anger rings our bell and delivers one of our root beliefs. This is good information, but the next part is more than information, it's transformational: All of the beliefs that anger delivers come with a return label.
There is a sticker on the package that says, "Here is one of your root beliefs! Would you like to keep, return, or exchange this one?"
- page 266/267

"Anger delivers important information about where one of our boundaries has been crossed. When we answer the door and accept that delivery, we begin to know ourselves better. When we restore the boundary that was violated, we honor ourselves. When we know ourselves and honor ourselves, we live with integrity, peace, and power [...]."
- page 264