Quotes from Katherine Woodward Thomas

In the brain's world, better to have a negative bond than the existential death of no bond at all. And

There are a million little ways that a marriage grows apart, most too mundane to mention. Yet what happened to Mark and me, in a nutshell, is that I changed. And I mean, I radically and in many ways quite unfairly, changed. It's kind of an occupational hazard—the downside of being a teacher

to expect more of my primary partnership than staying together for the sake of the children

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken. WILLIAM STAFFORD

It's time for you to give yourself the love, attention, loyalty, and care you've been trying to get from others your whole life. Grief has you gripped tightly by the ankles, and she may not let you go too soon. There's nowhere to go but home to yourself. This simple gesture of giving yourself your full attention when sorrow is shaking you to the bone promises to carve depth and kindness into the core of who you are—more than anything else I know.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet. WINSTON CHURCHILL

What we found is that when people [are] excluded, you see activity in…the neural regions [of the brain] that are also involved in the distressing component of pain, or what sometimes people call the 'suffering component' of pain.

I don't know that we ever 'get rid' of our woundedness. Our wounding experiences are a part of our history. We can, however, give up defining ourselves by what happened to us in the past. We can stop identifying ourselves with the pain that we have suffered. This is not a denial of what we've been through but, rather, an awareness that the essence of who we are is far, far beyond it.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out. ROBERT FROST

Social rejection—or the feeling of not belonging, of being less than others, unwanted, and an outcast—activates the same brain regions as physical pain.

Grief does not change you. It reveals you. JOHN GREEN

Those who hurt you in the past have no authority to determine whether or not you will live a life of love and fulfillment. You are the only one holding that power.

You must go back to rescue the younger you from that wacky and distorted hall of mirrors. Because the meaning you made about yourself and your life—that you are bad, not wanted, not loved, too much, not enough, powerless, and/or destined to be alone in life—is simply not true.

When you complain, you make yourself into a victim…So change the situation…leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness. ECKHART TOLLE

The end of love is a crossroads, and there will be those who go on to live lesser lives in the aftermath of heartbreak. My hope is that you are not one of them.

Love exists to the extent that you give it away.

you must become more interested in what's possible from here on than you are in rectifying the past, and more invested in how you might midwife this transition harmoniously than in getting what you want in the short term.

True love feels perfectly safe to explore and admit one's weaknesses, because doing so is not an admission that one is bad or inferior in any way.

You have to consciously create the possibility of an affirmative future while coming to terms with the painful loss of the future you'd envisioned

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean. MAYA ANGELOU

When you seek to know all of the answers, your life then becomes limited by that which you already know. When you seek to ask deep and relevant questions, your life is only limited by the extent of your courage and willingness to learn and to try something new.

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move." JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Taking risks means that you are willing to take actions that are outside of your confort zone. It means living life in a way that allows you, even challenges you, to expand yourself beyond who you know yourself to be.

Every way that you've given away your power, denied your own deeper knowing, put someone else's feelings and needs before your own, stayed embedded in a victimized story, or settled for less in life—all of it is now up for review. You have nowhere to hide. Life has broken you open and it is violently, mercilessly forcing you to evolve, to develop, and to grow. In