Quotes from Heather Havrilesky

It's hard to want what we have; it's far easier to want everything in the world.

Sometimes when you are good at hard work, you give yourself too much of it. And with too much hard work in front of you, you might not also have the time and space to be truly brilliant.

I used to be more like that woman, having fun with whatever task was in front of me instead of freaking out about how I looked to other people. I need to figure out how to get back there. My life has turned out great. Sow why am I comparing myself to perfectly styled, enviable, energetic professional in my head?...I keep saying to myself: "This is all wrong You are all wrong."..."You should be a shiny, infallible adult by now. Why are you still such a mess?

Refusing to smile, refusing to agree, refusing to comply: These things mean that you are difficult and you want to be unhappy.

crushes are often just misplaced ambition

I AM AN OLD NOBODY AND I LOVE WHAT I DO

Contrary to popular wisdom, growing older does not make you less conflicted. In fact, you become more and more conflicted by the second. You can see all sides of any given thing. It's all stupid bullshit and you want all of it, everything, and you also want none of it,

It takes work sometimes, to love the people you trust, and to trust the people you love.

The beauty and the ultimate value of a story like Mad Men lies in its repeated insistence that unless we stop searching for more, we'll never truly find happiness or peace.

Hold your own space and honor yourself and don't let that space shrink or collapse in the company of indifference. Don't ask indifference to love you. Indifference can go fuck itself. This is your life, and it's going to be big and bright and beautiful.

Here's the thing: being nice is worthless if you're just going to feel resentful about it in the end.

You will find love. Believe me. But in order to find it, I think you have to prepare yourself for a life alone and be at peace with that. It's a real tightrope walk. I get it. But you won't tell tepid to fuck off if you don't believe in your heart that you will rock it out one way or another.

As a parent, you do have to constantly remind yourself that you are not a god, molding a human in your own image. You are merely supporting whatever your child chooses to become, even if those choices don't always thrill you.

You have to go from being a volcano that lies dormant for years and then explodes out of the blue, decimating several villages of innocent people, to becoming a volcano that lets off a slow, steady lava flow that's truly beautiful, yet predictable enough that people can come and marvel at its beauty without getting their faces singed off.

you're treating love and success as external rewards that bring happiness, when in fact love and success are side effects of happiness.

Marriage can't always be about living your best lives in sync. Because some of the peak moments of a marriage are when you share in your insecurities, your anxieties, your fears, and your longing.

From a distance, the solid ground of marriage has a way of looking mundane and exotic at the same time.

Your hatred has power because it points back to your weaknesses. Your hatred makes you feel small and helpless. Your hatred gives you a motive, an attraction, a reason to try. Your hatred fuels you. Your hatred turns you on, in other words.

Even as depression and anxiety, or else simple dissatisfaction with the state of things, are as prevalent as ever, we are urged to get over these feelings, to recover from them, to bounce back quickly, or else to conceal them. To do otherwise is to embrace the "fail." You are not following the rules. Start acting like a happy winner or you might become a depressed loser forever.

My disappointment had a clear source. I would try to make things perfect and I would fail, over and over again. I couldn't just love someone and be loved back. That was too easy. That didn't feel right. I was more familiar with dissatisfaction. I was more at home with longing. As I moved me things into that dusty, tiny, haunted house, I looked around and thought, "This will never be enough." It was exactly what I wanted.

Whether he was flirting with you, hiring you, or marrying you, Don Draper was just not that into you.

The future turned out to be just as incredible as I imagined it would be when I was little. But these days, I just want to slow down. I want to pull the shutters closed and block out the world. I want to spend hours gluing things together. I want to fill my house with tiny bits of collected junk. The more I have, the more I realize that all that matters is

He acts like he doesn't even notice that I should be locked away forever and ever in some bad, drafty place that serves only American cheese.

But we weren't married yet, so he still thought he could do whatever he wanted.