Quotes from Heather Havrilesky

You are a nice person, and you're also full of anger. You're a walking tangle of contradictions. That's okay. Most of us are like that. Women, most of all. How could we not be? People want us to be sexy warriors who roll over and play dead on command. They want us to be flirty burlesque dancers in burkas, aggressive conquistadors with cookies in the oven, Dorothy Parker meets Dorothy Gale, Sandra Bernhard meets Sandra Dee, Kristen Stewart meets Martha Stewart.

Many of us learn to construct a clear and precise vision of what we want, but we're never taught how to enjoy what we actually have. There will always be more victories to strive for, more strangers to charm, more images to collect and pin to our vision boards. It's hard to want what we have; it's far easier to want everything in the world.

But here is what I tell my own daughters, when they start to place all of the magic outside of themselves, when they start to feel like some random dude owns the sun and the moon and the stars: The world has told you lies about how small you are.

The more I have, The more I realize that all that matters is the small discoveries, the little interactions, the improvised, messy, glued-together moments that lie at the centre of our happiness. Everything else is just a distraction.

I am here, trying. I am a person who tries. I do what I fucking can. It's okay to just try.

It's not easy to do the things you dream of doing. Sometimes it's not that easy just to get up in the morning. That's how it is for everyone.

We are called to plant these seeds in our world: to dare to tell every living soul that they already matter, that their seemingly mundane lives are a slowly unfolding mystery, that their small choices and acts of generosity are vitally important.

It takes hard work to say, "This is how I am," in a calm voice, without anxiously addressing how you should be.

Yet this chirpy insistence on positivity has a strange way of enhancing the dread and anxiety and melancholy that lie just beneath the surface of things.

When everything is bent into a jolly shape, everything feels more mournful than it should.

Other people will always appear to move with dedication and consequence. How else does a person behave when people are watching?

It takes work to shift your focus from the smudges on the window to the view outside.

The question isn't whether or not your stuff sparks joy. The question is: Can you spark joy all by yourself?

They treat each other the way Mozart's father treated him. They say to each other, "Whatever is here, even when it feels a little dark, even when it confuses me, I have chosen it as divine.

We are encouraged to believe in our dreams, but we are assumed to dream in the same limited palette as everyone else. We are to view ourselves as unique snowflakes only as it facilitates more efficiently melting ourselves into bottled spring water.

I used to admire people who could hang with anything. Now the women I admire the most are women who never pretend to be different than they are. Women like that express their anger. They admit when they're down. They don't beat themselves up over their bad moods. They allow themselves to be grumpy sometimes. They grant themselves the right to be grouchy, or to say nothing, or to decline your offer without a lengthy explanation.

A century ago, survival was the main event. Longing was an accepted part of existence. Today, the inability to achieve happiness or fit in with the herd is treated as a kind of moral failure.

And maybe when he died, he didn't think, "Is this all I get?" the way we, the narrow-minded living, might imagine, in the face of such a premature death. Maybe he thought, "I lived a rich life. I embraced what I was given, and it was incredible.

Everything must be improving. If things are bad, they are always about to get better. Reluctance to see it that way will be encountered as willful misery…Yet this chirpy insistence on positivity has a strange way of enhancing the dread and anxiety and melancholy that lie just beneath the surface of things.

In other centuries (and in other lands), melancholy and longing were considered a natural part of the human condition. Now they are a moral failing, a way of signaling to the world that you're a loser and a quitter. You have to change your attitude and play nicely with others, even if that means bullshitting your way through every interaction. Everyone wants to see you turn that frown upside down. Smiles, everyone, smiles! Like you mean it this time.

You are weak and raw and broken, and that's okay. That's where real life begins. Throw yourself into that rawness., Dive into a bunch of stories about absorbing and leaning into disappointment and loss and melancholy as a way of moving through it.

engages in the 105th hour of an ongoing discussion about Bill's Bad Knee, which includes speculation, revised imaginary diagnoses, and in-depth analysis of a level of pain that she herself would file under Not Worth Mentioning at All, Ever, Not Even for a Fucking Second?

Even natural wonders aren't what they used to be, because nothing can be experienced without commentary. In the 1950s, we worried about how TV would affect our culture. Now our entire lives are a terrible talk show that we can't turn off. It often feels like we're struggling to find ourselves and each other in a crowded, noisy room. We are plagued, around the clock, by the shouting and confusion and fake intimacy of the global community, mid-nervous breakdown.

The past is reduced to a slide show. The future is a YouTube video that won't load.