“Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always ‘save ten percent of yourself.’ What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. ‘Even from Daddy, I save,’ she would add.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 18)
“She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed. She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale. She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best. And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to free.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 143)
“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
Henry David Thoreau, via The Midnight Library (Page 126)