"The saddest realization I've had in my life is that my parents are people.  Sad, human people.  I aged a decade in that moment."
-The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer

"If you can bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.  What a miracle is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.  Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave.  They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.  They are full of all the things that you don't get in real life - wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat.  And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention.  An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift.  My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.  Aren't you? I ask."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"Writing can give you what having a baby can give you:  it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"I'm good at science because I'm good at listening.  I have been told I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded.  I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that I can't do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman.  I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death.  I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine.  I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous.  But I was told all of these things by people who can't understand the present or see the future any better than I can.  Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, anybody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along.  I don't take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it.  When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences:  You shouldn't take this job too seriously.  Except for when you should."
-Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

"But for the most part, it's the rest of the sharp and rigid world that wants to drown you, knock your teeth out, cave your skull in when you're going down.  I develop a new consciousness, at all times wondering, What am I near?  What would it do to my body if I fell on it/into it right now?  I learn you can't trust coffee table corners, rooftop edges.  You can't trust urinals either - massive grinning underbites that would get a good laugh out of leaving me to be discovered unconscious, pants down, molars scattered across the linoleum.  Hard things, tall things, and wet things - double-crossing murders.  Bathtubs are my personal nemesis though - hard, wet, and untrustworthy.  Porcelain caskets.  For a while we crack the doors during my baths so my parents can rush in if they hear splashing.  Then I switch to showers altogether."
-How To Ruin Everything by George Watsky

"I wish someone had told me this simple but confusing truth: Even when everything's going your way you can still be sad.  Or anxious.  Or uncomfortably numb.  Because you can't always control your brain or your emotions even when things are perfect."
-Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson

"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 they 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

"If she could stand it, I'd tell her that sometimes she can be pretty funny - in a Maggie Smith-ish way - and has a kind of grit I don't see in many other women.  I'd tell her I'm no longer secretly trying to change her, to make her more outgoing or liberal or spendy.

I want her to know I have learned the difference between pampering and love, adventure and life experience, mothers and fathers.

I see now what she did for my dad and me, how she let our relationship stay simple and uncomplicated by drawing the fouls and taking the hits.  It was her gift to me as a girl in the world, and I will give the same gift to my daughters. 

I want her to know that I have seen how the light changes over the course of the day and I know that the rooms that start cold get warmer.

I'd tell her that I know now that there are no daughters who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, neglect, baffle, appall, incite, or insult their mothers. 

I want her to know that although I vote for Democrats and cry easily and still spend all my money going to places no one ever needs to go, I hate shopping and cooking.  I live within my means and worship my girlfriends, especially the ones who play cards and rag me about keeping the thermostat set too low.  I don't long for other mothers anymore; I don't even wonder about them.  I was meant to be her daughter, and I consider it a damn good thing that she, or all people, was the principal agent in my development. 

I want to tell my mom that I admire her, the quiet hero of 168 Wooded Lane the way she marched head-on into each uncertain moment, changing as the circumstances demanded, like finding a good-paying job at forty-eight with three kids in college. 

Even though I don't always know what she's talking about or why something bothers her or what's making her smile, it doesn't matter, I don't care anymore, I love her."
-Glitter and Glue: A Memoir by Kelly Corrigan

"The thing about mothers, I want to say, is that once the containment ends and one becomes two, you don't always fit together so neatly.  They don't get you like you want them to, like you think they should, they could, if only they would pay closer attention.  They agonize over all the wrong things, cycling trough one inane idea after another: seat belts, flossing, the Golden Rule.  The living mother-daughter relationship, you learn over and over again, is a constant choice between adaptation and acceptance."
-Glitter and Glue: A Memoir by Kelly Corrigan

"'I never promised the universe that I would be a great writer, goddamn it!  I just promised the universe that I would be a writer'"

At seventy-five pages in, I nearly stopped.  It felt too terrible to continue, too deeply embarrassing.  But I pushed through my own shame only because I decided that I refused to go to my grave with seventy-five pages of an unfinished manuscript sitting in my desk drawer.  I did not want to be that person.  The world is filled with too many unfinished manuscripts as it is, and I didn't want to add another one to that bottomless pile.  So no matter how much I thought my work stank, I had to persist.

I also kept remembering what my mother always used to say: 'Done is better than good.'"
-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

"I think it was my parents' example of quietly impudent self-assertion that gave me the idea that I could be a writer, or at least that I could go out there and try.  I never recall my parents expressing any worry whatsoever at my dreams of becoming a writer.  If they did worry, they kept quiet about it - but honestly, I don't think they were concerned.  I think they had faith that I would always be able to take care of myself, because they had taught me to.  (Anyhow, the golden rule in my family is this: If you're supporting yourself financially and you're not bothering anyone else, then you're free to do whatever you want with your life.)

Maybe because they didn't worry too much about me, I didn't worry too much about me, either.

It also never occurred to me to go ask an authority figure for permission to become a writer."
-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

"And that would be a pity, because your life is short and rare and amazing and miraculous, and you want to do really interesting things and make really interesting things while you're still here.  I know that's what you want for yourself, because that's what I want for myself, too.

It's what we all want. 

And you have treasures hidden within you - extraordinary treasures - and so do I, and so does everyone around us.  And bringing those treasures to light takes work and faith and focus and courage and hours of devotion, and the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small."
-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

"It isn't always comfortable or easy - carrying your fear around with you on your great and ambitious road trip, I mean - but it's always worth it, because if you can't learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you'll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting."
-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

"If you're lucky, home is not only a place you leave, but also a place where you someday arrive."
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"If you're a daughter, your mother's face is your first mirror, and if you share her features - in our case hazel eyes, brown hair, a serious amount of freckles, a small frame with those 'narrow shoulders held erect' - odds are you'll unconsciously adopt her attitude of self-regard.  My mother considered herself to be plain, if not homely, and so I believed her, and so I considered myself...I carried this phantom twin wherever I went, no matter that I couldn't have been more different myself..."
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"I wondered what my childhood home might reveal about me to a stranger.  It never ceases to astonish me how readily we presume to know ourselves, when in fact we know so little."
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"Eventually, whether you choose or are chosen, joyously accept or grudgingly resist, you take the plunge.

You are born, you grow up, you become a wife.

But what if it wasn't this way?

What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending?

What would that look and feel like?"
 -Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick