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1 " Your only job is creating a life that contains a story worth telling. "
― Carolyn Parkhurst , Harmony
2 " Imagine that your child is born with wings. "
3 " Happiness, as it exists in the wild—as opposed to those artificially constructed moments like weddings and birthday parties, where it’s gathered into careful piles—is not smooth. Happiness in the real world is mostly just resilience and a willingness to arch oneself toward optimism. To believe that people are more good than bad. To believe that the waves carrying you are neither friendly nor malicious, and to know that you’re less likely to drown if you stop struggling against them. "
4 " There’s a startling fact that you read somewhere: after airbags became standard in cars, statisticians noticed that the incidence of severe leg injuries increased dramatically. Think about it for a minute: Why should that be? Is there something about the way airbags inflate during collision that targets the passengers’ legs, makes them more vulnerable? No. It’s a matter of checks and balances. Before airbags, there were certain accidents that would have killed you; you’d be a corpse in the morgue, and no one would be paying any attention to your legs. When we change the way we do things—the way we shop for groceries or take care of our children or protect ourselves from harm—we set other changes in motion, for good or for ill. And it may be years before we figure out what we’ve done. "
5 " Life is never what you expect it to be. Sex has more to do with salt than sweetness. The sky is white as often as it's blue. "
6 " It may not be terribly fruitful to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t satisfying. "
7 " A crisis of faith doesn’t have to be about God. You can have a crisis of faith about dust mites and food additives that cause behavioral changes. "
8 " Imagine if our lives were treated as carefully as the rest of history. Imagine if we were documented as conscientiously, preserved as gently. Each birth at least as important as a naval victory. Each death a national tragedy. There are plenty of ways to remember someone: a park bench, a colossus, an epic poem. Your only job is creating a life that contains a story worth telling. "
9 " past. For a minute, you have the ability to be in two places at once: you’re forty and pissed at your husband and too old to be in this bar, but you’re also twelve and sitting in your childhood living room, watching MTV like you’re going to be tested on it. Like it might actually teach you something. You’re practically taking notes. The way they’re dancing, the way the women have applied their lipstick: this is one way a life can be. In a few minutes, Van Halen or Cyndi Lauper will show you another way, and you’ll see what you think of that one. "
10 " Tilly might say that it’s not fair that it’s the presidents and generals, the famous scholars and civic leaders, who get the monuments. But she’s also too young to see the way that we’re all acting out the same stories, over and over again. We are all, at any given moment, Adam or Eve, Bathsheba or Odysseus or Scarlett O’Hara. The Little Match Girl or someone you read about in the newspaper. Seen from a great distance, it might appear that none of us is ever doing anything new at all. "
11 " They’re too young to understand how much of life is shaped by never the same. "
12 " a couple of fountains and four giant slabs of marble containing Roosevelt quotes. They’re labeled “Nature,” “Youth,” “The State,” and “Manhood.” “They put those up in the ’60s,” says Tilly. “I think it was kind of a sexist decade.” You "
13 " You believe, fervently, that falling in love is the one holy mystery in an otherwise secular life. "
14 " Like every parent, you have to teach your girl to live a contradiction, to be exceptional and ordinary, all at the same time. "
15 " You picture a garden gone to seed: moss growing on the surface of our spleens, vines squeezing our kidneys. Tiny mushrooms spreading across the linings of our intestines. "
16 " How is it that we ever manage to forget how brief and fragile our lives are? The time will come when your body will stop working. Your mind—now in constant movement, containing vast galaxies—will no longer think. Of course, you know this; you, as much as anyone else, are subject to those brief, terrifying moments of clarity. Bright bursts of anxiety, blooming and swelling. But is that all you’re supposed to do with that knowledge—fear it? Or are you supposed to hold on to it, use it to figure out how you want to move through the wor "