Mary Laura Philpott Quotes

What I wanted, after several years of staying at home, alternating freelance proofreading jobs with trips to the toddler playground, was a little more structure, a little more sense of purpose, and some acknowledgement from somewhere that I was important. I had not ceased to be a member of society just because I no longer applied a swoop of eyeliner each morning before I went out into the world and sat around conference tables where other people could see me.

I knew that one of the reasons we talked so much when we were younger was that we needed to figure out who we were and what we believed - we needed to hear it out loud, change it a little, hear it again. I knew time was at a premium and life was more complicated nowadays; there was less time available for talking. But didn't the very fact that life was more complicated now mean we had more to talk about, not less?

I needed to know that once school ended, I'd still have goals to reach for - if not grades to earn, then professional accomplishments to rack up. I wanted a ladder with rungs, a hierarchy with titles, some structure to place around my need to achieve. I was afraid to exist without succeeding, I just had to figure out what to succeed at.

But maybe the trick isn't sticking everything out. The trick is quitting the right thing at the right time. The trick is understanding that saying "No, thank you" to something you're expected to accept isn't failure. It's a whole other level of success.

It takes courage to quit something, but often you get that courage back with dividends.

We all keep certain phrases handy in our minds - Hanging on hooks just inside the door where we can grab them like a raincoat, for easy access

My mind seeks the tidiness of a question answered. An agenda complete. A box checked. That's what harmony feels like in my brain. Wasted time and wrong answers disrupt that harmony like an off-key instrument making a dissonant clang in a musician's ears.

None of us will be okay, in the end. The not-okay is coming for everyone... We act like there are safe places. We behave as though if we work hard and acquire the right things, gain the right access, put ourselves in the right zones, we can arrive someplace where danger can't touch us- where anything can't happen. We pretend that if we can identify someone else's loss as greater than our own, we won't lose. But nothing really guards our lives. Lifeguards don't exist.

Whether you think you know exactly who you'll become or have absolutely no idea, I tell them, one this is true for everyone, for better or for worse: Life will surprise you. You'll hit dead-ends and detours. There will be times when you can't fathom what comes next. When that happens, remember yourself as you are right now. Remember yourself as you were when you were even younger. Who were you when you weren't wondering who you were?

Over time, "I miss you when I blink" became another one of these phrases. It helps me live in the moment. It slows me down and makes me absorb each instant instead of rushing, because I know already how much I miss things that happened in the past-how they're right there behind my eyelids but also gone forever.

Sometimes, in moments of memory or daydream, I feel the different iterations of myself pass by each other, as if right-now-me crosses paths with past-me or imaginary-me or even future-me in the hallways of my mind. "I miss you when I blink," one says. "I'm right here," says the other, and reaches out of hand.

Even if you deliberately choose to do a "wrong" thing, you're choosing it, which means you've picked it as the right thing to do.

Deciding what you won't have in your life is as important as deciding what you will have. Trying out something you expect to love, realizing you don't really love it, and giving it back, that takes guts.

The picture you get a the end of a connect-the-dots activity really depends on which dots you decide to use. So try thing and go through phases. Put down lots of dots. Later, you can look back and pick any of those dots to create a picture of how you became who you are. And if you don't like the picture you end up with, you can always choose different dots, which just goes to show destiny isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Somewhere deep in my twisted little brain is the desire to be so good at so many things that I earn the chance to be multiple people. It seems so unfair that we only get to read the choose-your-own adventure book of our lives once, that we can't pick a point and go, "Okay, this time flip to page 102 and do the rest another way.

Maybe we all walk around assuming everyone is interpreting the world the same way we are, and being surprised when they aren't, and that's the loneliness and confusion of the human experience in a nutshell.