"Or institute a progressive artists' colony where young dreamers could take up their own work.  She could help them avoid the eighteen-hour days, the perpetual temper tantrums, the name-dropping, the ego trip, the talentless and tormented."
-Why We Came to the City by Kristopher Jansma

"I woke up each morning and watched her dance in the sunlight coming through the curtains and thought, Jesus, she is the most magnificent girl I have ever seen.  Sometimes my breath would even catch and my eyes tear up at her effortless joy and perfection.  And then I walked to my bathroom to get ready for the day and swore under my breath at the haggard and fat reflection staring back at me.  Until one day it hit me.  In a few years Gigi will stand in front of her own mirror, hating her own thick thighs and giant feet.  She'll call herself fat and disgusting.  She might even think, for a moment, that it would just be easier to not exist at all.  I don't know what would destroy me more.  The part that she could even for one moment think that she is anything other than beautiful, or the fact that she learned it all from me.

Of all the hobbies I have picked up and dropped over the years - the fiddle, magic, competitive eating - body hate has been my most dedicated and refined.  And now with the birth of just one tiny and beautiful girl, everything I knew about myself had changed."
-Fat Girl Walking by Brittany Gibbons

"I hop in the shower and assure myself that behind every good woman is a little back fat."
-American Housewives by Helen Ellis

"Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body."
-Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

"The experience of being alive, it's isness, maybe in relation to the future isn'tness of death or maybe independent of that, or maybe a hybrid of both, can hurt so much sometimes.  Sometimes it still hurts so much to be alive that I want to die.  I am scared of dying and sad about dying and that is part of the hurt."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I think it was then that I first made the connection that underneath my anxiety was a great sadness.  When I suppressed the sadness, I practically shook with existential fear over simply existing.  I was fighting myself.  But when the tears flowed, I felt better."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane.  In dramatic situations the world rises to meet your anxiety.  When there are no dramatic situations available, you turn the mundane into the dramatic."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I feel bad about my struggle, because it's nothing compared to other people's struggles and yet it still hurts."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"If people never become real, it's harder for them to disappoint you.  That's why the Internet is good for sad people.  You can be with people without having to be with people."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"Like a home's something you have to earn when you're seventeen."
-The Boy Most Likely To by Huntley Fitzpatrick

"There is a large part of me, the committee, that wants to see me dead.  If it can't kill me, it'll settle for seeing me miserable.  It wants me spinning out on what I lack, talking to myself.  I don't know why these forces exist in me that want me to die, I guess I'm just wired that way.  But it's cool that there is this other part of me that must really want to live.  I don't have scientific proof of its existence, and I don't need it.  I'm still alive.  So I know it's there."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"When I'm sleeping, the committee stays up all night and then greets me at dawn with really bad ideas.  It's like, Good morning!  Everything is shit!  Time to act impulsively.  But first let's start by getting into fights with imaginary people from the past.  Next let's catalog everything that's wrong with you and your life.  Also, I want to remind you of everything you don't have - and everything you should be scared of losing.  Let's begin." 
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"The thing is, I'm self-centered.  I guess I'd prefer some cosmic judge thinking shitty things about me, rather than nothing thinking about me at all."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"Perhaps it is that I am of the stars and he is of the earth."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"We got to be magic together.  But is magic even real?

I want what is unreal to rescue me from the world.  I want to be a shadow of myself dancing."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"What happens to the space that two people occupied together?  How can it just disappear?  Why can it just become something else?"
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"(The thing about spending eight consecutive hours in a confined space with the same people day after day is there will always be that one person who appears more special and attractive than he or she actually is.)"
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I'm in love with you and you don't want anything to do with me so I think we can make this work: a love story."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I could say 'I love my body' so that I appear to be a good feminist.  But that only means pretending to love something I hate."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"For if we could be satisfied with anything, we should have been satisfied long ago."
-Seneca

"Hate is a lot like love.  It's warm and fills you up every part of you is tingling to release it."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"'Hell, we were high school sweethearts.'

That's the most depressing part about the whole thing.  People who have prom pictures together should never get a divorce."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"I grip my knees with both hands and try to hold my body together.  I'm about to rip at the seams; if I cry, everything inside me is going to fly out.  When someone opens the door, pieces of me will be borne away on the wind.  I'll never be able to find all of them.  I'll never be whole.  I'll never be whole."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"His hands grip the wheel, his knuckles white, and I stare at them for a moment, lost in a memory of him teaching me to write, his fingers gently guiding my own.  This is the man who gave me words.  But he didn't listen when I tried to use them."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"I know that if I want to understand what it means to let someone in, someone other than Benny, I'll have to take a risk.  I have to hope that he won't let me down.  That he can be a person who is a place - a place where I can go and call a time-out on all the uncertainty and awfulness of my life."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"We visit their families.  We look at their photos, we meet their college friends.  All this contributes to a sense that we've done our homework.  We haven't.  Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating."
-Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person by Alain de Botton

"'When you look into your baby's eyes,' my friend Sarah once said to me, 'that will become your Tibet.'  I have no doubt that looking into one's own baby's eyes is many inexpressibly wonderful things, but one thing it is not is Tibet."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"But to me, the lack of desire to have a child is innate.  It exists outside of my control.  It is simply who I am and I can take neither credit nor blame for all that it may or may not signify.  But the decision to honor that desire, to find a way to be whole or my own terms even if it means facing the judgment, scorn, and even pity of mainstream society, is a victory.  It's a victory I celebrate every day."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"I decided to take the love I'd have for a child and give it to myself instead."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"But herein lies the rub: as it stands now, I suspect that my commitment to and delight in parenting would be formidable that it would take precedence over anything and everything else in my life; that my mastery of motherhood would eclipse my need for - or ability to achieve - success in any other arena.  Basically, I'm afraid of my own competence."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children."
-Doris Lessing

"Brokenheartedness is a sisterhood with involuntary membership."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"When I'd texted him to say I wouldn't need a ride, he'd replied with an empty 'OK.'  I didn't know what I'd expected him to say, but tears itched at my eyes.  I'm a basket case, I thought.  Who gets emotional over two letters?  But then I remembered that 'no' also has only two letters.  Almost everyone in the world has cried over those."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"'What are we waiting for?'  The words hung in the air for a moment, and I wondered if he knew what I meant.  I was still tiptoeing, not daring to cross the friendship line.'"
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"I wondered where somewhere was.  I wondered if this was a date.  I wondered if he had planned all of this and what it meant.  But most of all, I wondered if a person could actually burst from so many feelings at once."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"I weighed it in my mind for the thousandth time: the fluttering in my chest versus the shattering possibility of destroying our friendship.

And even though I rolled my eyes, I made my way toward him."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"Things change.  There are so many outside forces coming at marriage; finances and jobs and houses and children.  You can lose each other if you're not careful.  It doesn't mean it was all a wash."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"When it all closes in, there are only two kinds of people: best friends and everyone else."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"She behaved as if there had always been the One Great Leaving and each iteration of it brought the same welling up.  A love that big could only create havoc, and I hurried out of her arms, ashamed to be the one who could stir her up like that."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"Meanwhile, I'm an introvert and so is Brendan.  Children exhaust us, even the ones we love most.  Our solitude is the most valuable thing we have, and we cherish it above most other things and work hard to maintain it."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"She couldn't escape the storms raging in her own skull any more than I was now able to escape mine.  I worried that if I had a baby, I'd inflict this on her.  I would be a good mother in every way I could, but I'd also be a very troubled one."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"God, why do I have to be a person who yearns so much?"
-P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han

"When someone's been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them.  You try to keep track of everything in your head.  But it's like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand:  all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you're just clutching air and grit.  That's why you can't save it all up like that.

Because by the time you finally see each other, you're catching up only on the big things, because it's too much bother to tell about the little things.  But the little things are what make up life."
-To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han

"...they seem to forget that you're a mere mortal: flesh and bone, bruisable and scareable."
-Where She Went by Gayle Forman

"I wonder how I ever thought I was desirable.  But inside, I know.  I used to have sparkle, self-assurance.  I didn't turn green and serious and grave eyed at first."
-The Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

"I like people too much or not at all.  I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them."
-The Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

"After all, artists - especially writers - need more alone time than regular people.  They crave solitude whereas many people fear it.  They resign themselves to financial uncertainty whereas most people do anything can to avoid it.  Moreover, if an artist is lucky, her work becomes her legacy, thus theoretically lessening the burden of producing a child to carry it out."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"Listen to the mustn'ts, child.  Listen to the don'ts.  Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts.  Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me...anything can happen, child.  Anything can be."
-Listen to the Mustn'ts by Shel Silverstein

"It's been a beautiful
fight

still
is."
-You Get So Alone at Times by Charles Bukowski

"'You could rattle the stars,' she whispered.  'You could do anything, if you only dared.  And deep down, you know it, too.  That's what scares you most.'"
-Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

"To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly."
-Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

"For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is.  Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life.  Stop waiting.  This is it:  there's nothing else.  It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever."
-The Magicians by Lev Grossman

"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are.  They deserve respect.  If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."
-The Real Thing: A Play by Tom Stoppard

"Those years weren't lost.  They simply weren't the way I'd planned them."
-Letters by Kurt Vonnegut

"It's bullshit to think of friendship and romance as being different.  They're not.  They're just variations of the same love, variations of the same desire to be close.  And like any love, it's difficult, awesome, treacherous, exhilarating, confusing - and precious."
-Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List by Rachel Cohn