Year of Yes QUOTES

181 " On my graduation day, I was grieving. "

182 " Perhaps you think that it is important to your child’s personal growth to bake goods in your house. More power to you, my sister. I will defend your right to bake your brownies, I will march for your right to home-bake whatever you damn well want to home-bake. But I will take off my earrings and ask someone to hold my purse for the verbal beat-down we will need to engage in if you try to tell me that I must define my motherhood in the same terms as yours. There’s room enough for everybody here. This is a big, big maternity tent. If I want to buy my brownies from Costco and drop them off in a wrinkled brown paper bag still wrapped in the plastic and foil container with the orange price sticker still attached, guess what? That’s how it’s gonna go down. Suck it, judgies. I am not telling you to do it that way. You go bake your ass off. But we all have to acknowledge that our way is not the way. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

183 " I make up characters. I create whole worlds in my head. I add words to the lexicon of daily conversation—maybe you talk about your vajayjay and tell your friend that someone at work got Poped because of my shows. I birth babies, I end lives. I dance it out. I wear the white hat. I operate. I gladiate. I exonerate. I spin yarns and tell tall tales and sit around the campfire. I wrap myself in fiction. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

184 " but I only ever write about one thing: being alone. The fear of being alone, the desire to not be alone, the attempts we make to find our person, to keep our person, to convince our person to not leave us alone, the joy of being with our person and thus no longer alone, the devastation of being left alone. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

185 " And I am always going to yell “What the fuck!” at the PTA meeting if you tell me the brownies need to be homemade. I am already in the middle of a Great Mommy War and it is against my worst enemy—me. I don’t need another war against you. I’m betting you don’t need one either. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

186 " I don’t think they are different from the moms at the other school. It is that I am different. All the moms were great all along. I just couldn’t see it. Now, I’m no longer looking for the enemy. So I no longer see the enemy. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

187 " And I think this is the thing: everyone's got some greatness in them.
You do. That girl over there does. That guy to the left has some. but in order to really mine it, you have to own it. You have to grab hold of it. You have to believe it. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

188 " Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it. 15 Yes to Beautiful I am standing on an apple box. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

189 " See, I am an introvert. Deep. To the bone. My marrow is introvert marrow. My snot is introvert snot. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

190 " We all spend our lives kicking the crap out of ourselves for not being this way or that way, not having this thing or that thing, not being like this person or that person. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

191 " I believe everyone’s body is theirs and everyone has a right to love their body in whatever size and shape and package it comes in. I will fight for anyone’s right to do so. I will kick ass and take names if I have to. Your body is yours. My body is mine. No one’s body is up for comment. No matter how small, how large, how curvy, how flat. If you love you, then I love you. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

192 " And it wasn’t just because Oprah was awesome. Oprah is without a doubt, the best talk show host on the planet and incredibly smart, insightful and kind. And she was awesome. But we have established that she has always been awesome and still, before the Year of Yes, the old Shonda would have suffered some kind of nuclear panic attack, resulting in total amnesia. Oprah will always be amazing in this scenario. The difference was me. I had no armor on. I had nothing to hide. I was worried about nothing. I was . . . fearless. And so we had a conversation. We had a chat. We talked. What had I always been so afraid of? What had I been guarding? What was I so nervous about? "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

193 " Being a mother redefines us, reinvents us, destroys and rebuilds us. Being a mother brings us face-to-face with ourselves as children, with our mothers as human beings, with our darkest fears of who we really are. Being a mother requires us to get it together or risk messing up another person forever. Being a mother yanks our hearts out of our bodies and attaches them to our tiny humans and sends them out into the world, forever hostages. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

194 " The upside of culling people from my life is that my focus has become very clear. My vision has become razor sharp. I now work to see people, not as I’d rewrite them, but as they have written themselves. I see them for who they are. And for who I am with them. Because it’s not merely about surrounding myself with people who treat me well. It’s also about surrounding myself with people whose self-worth, self-respect and values inspire me to elevate my own behavior. People who require that I stay truthful and kind and not totally crazy. Not eating every single thing in sight. Not hiding. Not saying no. I want Ride or Dies who make me want to be a better person. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

195 " When someone says something petty or nasty, one of those little passive-aggressive things that would usually just pick at me for days, my new response is not to shut the door and bitch to anyone who will listen. Now? The moment they say it? “What did you mean by that?” I ask in a calm voice. It startles them. I realize that most of us aren’t used to being spoken TO. We are used to being spoken about. We are used to avoiding all the conflict. And of course, in the avoidance all we’re doing is creating more drama. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

196 " The feminist in me didn’t want to have the discussion with myself. I resented the need to talk about weight. It felt as though I was judging myself on how I looked. It felt shallow. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

197 " Like every other mother on the planet, from the moment my first baby entered the house, I stopped getting real sleep. Motherhood means I’m always a little bit awake, a little bit alert at all times. One eye open. So "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

198 " Stacy McKee (who is one of the new head writers at Grey’s Anatomy but started out way back in the beginning as the assistant on the show) IS the kind of mom who does crafts with her kids and puts photos of them up on Pinterest and Instagram. She works long, hard hours but still, you go into her office and as she’s talking scripts and story, she’s hot-gluing beads onto a princess cape for her daughter. I always furrow my brow and ask her why the hell she is doing this. Why? Or why the hell is she delicately hand-painting vistas onto Easter eggs? Or why is she doing any number of crazy amazing crafty things Stacy does for her kids? For the love of wine, why? Stacy will furrow her brow back at me, equally confused. “Why wouldn’t I?” she says. See, Stacy LOVES doing this stuff. She’d probably do it even if she didn’t have kids. Oh wait. I knew her back when she didn’t have kids and she WAS doing it. Stacy once spent days making incredibly lifelike renderings of all the Grey’s Anatomy characters out of pipe cleaners. PIPE CLEANERS. So it’s not about working moms vs. nonworking moms. It’s about people who love hot-gluing beads on capes vs. people who do not know what a hot-glue gun is. And it’s not even that. It’s about the non–glue gun people not assuming the glue gun people are judging them, and vice versa. Maybe don’t start out with your weapons raised. Maybe that Perfect PTA Mom didn’t even realize that homemade brownies could be a hardship. Maybe instead of yelling obscenities at the mention of homemade brownies, it would be better to stand up and gently point out that not everyone has the time or the bandwidth to make brownies. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

199 " I’m the one who spills. Who trips. Who drops. I once accidentally flung a chicken bone across the room at a very elegant cocktail party while trying to make a point. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes

200 " The goal is that everyone should get to turn on the TV and see someone who looks like them and loves like them. And just as important, everyone should turn on the TV and see someone who doesn’t look like them and love like them. Because perhaps then they will learn from them. "

― Shonda Rhimes , Year of Yes