Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There

within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.

The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything.

“The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young,” she wrote. “When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.”

And it’s a kind of love that will kill you if you let it.

You get to define the terms of your life.

We are all entitled to our opinions and religious beliefs, but we are not entitled to make shit up and then use the shit we made up to oppress other people.

We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not.

that moment they chose to tell the truth about themselves instead of staying “safe” inside the lie. They realized that, in fact, the lie wasn’t safe. That it threatened their existence more profoundly than the truth did.

She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.