Joy Reid Quotes

You’ve shown me joy where before I saw only despair. You’ve taught me hope where before I knew only hopelessness. I may be broken, but all my pieces are yours. And I’ll work every day of my life to deserve you.

Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you're used to being full of joy. But it's not so bad when you're used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay. Empty feels like a beginning. Which is nice, because for so long you have felt like you were at the end.

My ambition has long felt oppressive. It is not a joy—it is a master that I must answer to, a smoke that descends into my life, making it hard to breathe. It is only my discipline, my willingness to push myself harder, that has been my way through.

What's good is when everybody thinks you're headed somewhere fast, when you're all potential. Potential is pure fuckin' joy.

I would not always be joy, nor would I want inert contentment. Sorrow and struggle bring gravity to the soul and to the mind, a gravity that cannot be achieved through mere happiness. We are most awake to the world and to our own longings and desires when we suffer.

I did not pick up a racket to grow tense and weary and afraid of failing. I picked it up to feel the joy of smashing a ball as hard as I can. I picked it up to spend time with my dad.

One day, Emira when Emira would say good-bye to Briar, she'd also leave the joy of having somewhere to be, the satisfaction of understanding the rules, the comfort of knowing what's coming next, and the privilege of finding a home within yourself.

Good bosses shouldn't make you happy in a job that they wouldn't want to do themselves," she said. "It's my job to make you so miserable that you're forced into finding something that brings you joy, and then I help you seal the deal.

I know it hurts, honey.” Mom flipped off the gas stove and wiped her hands on her apron, turning to face me fully. “And it’s okay to hurt. Hurting is just as much a part of life as joy, maybe even more important. Falling down teaches you how to stand up.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel a hum in my bones that I have not felt in years. It is startling, the buzz of unexpected joy.

Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay. Empty feels like a beginning. Which is nice, because for so long you have felt like you were at the end. You

Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain.

His skin is wrinkled and droops. An old man's imperfect torso. Years on display in that sagging skin: quiet moments of pride and shame, excitement and fear, joy, guilt, desire, happiness, loss, love. I can see it. All of it and more. Just like my own.

Hurting is just as much a part of life as joy, maybe even more important. Falling down teaches you how to stand up.

And so, Nina, breathless and stunned at the joy daring to bloom within her, pulled her siblings to her, and decided to go. Just for a little while.

Sylvie Rabineau, thank you for loving Stevie Nicks the way I do and for handling the chaos that was Daisy Jones with grace and joy.

People say comparison is the thief of joy when it comes to success, right? But it’s also the thief of compassion when it comes to suffering.

Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you're used to being full of joy. But it's not so bad when you're used to feeling full of pain.

WARREN: Let me tell you the sweet spot for being in rock ’n’ roll. People think it’s when you’re at the top but no. That’s when you’ve got the pressure and the expectations. What’s good is when everybody thinks you’re headed somewhere fast, when you’re all potential. Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.

This will be the last tournament that I will ever play. And I can't help but enjoy it. I did not pick up a racket to grow tense and weary and afraid of failing. I picked it up to feel the joy of smashing a ball as hard as I can. I picked it up to spend time with my dad. This is it. My last moment of what he and I started together. This match. This tiebreaker. I could live in it forever.

And I got an idea. I took Celia’s hand and turned us around. “Wave to the crowd,” I said, smiling. “Like we’re the goddamn queens of England.” Celia smiled brightly and did exactly as I did. We stood there, in black and green, redhead and blonde, one of us all ass and the other all tits, waving to the crowd as if we ruled them. Ruby and Joy were nowhere to be seen. And the crowd roared for us.

This will be the last tournament that I will ever play. And I can’t help but enjoy it. I did not pick up a racket to grow tense and weary and afraid of failing. I picked it up to feel the joy of smashing a ball as hard as I can. I picked it up to spend time with my dad.

What is it they say? The days are long but the years are short? Whoever said that was a mom with three kids under the age of three. Tired and cranky on an hourly basis, bursting with joy when you put your head on the pillow. Raising kids is hard work. It was something I was happy to do, though.

Here is someone else who knew my father, someone else who knows what I have lost, someone who lost something too. [...] Both of us laugh, and I don't have a shred of guilt for feeling joyful without my father on this earth. This is the tiniest beginning of a terrible, beautiful whole new life.

The photographers started calling our names as we all walked in. My head was a jumble of words being thrown in my direction. “Ruby! Joy! Celia! Evelyn!” “Mr. and Mrs. Adler! Over here!” I could barely hear myself think over the din of cameras snapping and the crowd buzzing. But, as I had long ago trained myself to do, I pretended as if I felt perfectly calm inside, as if being treated like a tiger at the zoo was my most comfortable situation.

To the one and only Alex Jenkins Reid: Thank you for understanding why this book was so important to me and for being so into it. But more important, thank you for being the kind of man who encourages me to shout louder, dream bigger, and take less shit. Thank you for never making me feel as if I should make myself smaller to make anyone else feel better. It brings me an absolutely unparalleled amount of pride and joy to know that our daughter is growing up with a father who will stick by her side no matter who she is, who will show her how she should expect to be treated by modeling it for her. Evelyn did not have that. I did not have that. But she will. Because of you. And lastly, to my baby girl. You were teeny teeny tiny—I believe the size of half the period on the end of this sentence—when I started writing this book. And when I finished it, you were mere days away from making your entrance. You were with me every step of the way. I suspect it was, in no small part, you who gave me the strength to write it. I promise that I will repay the favor by loving you unconditionally and accepting you always, so that you feel strong enough and safe enough to do anything you set your mind to. Evelyn would want that for you. She would say, “Lilah, go out there, be kind, and grab what you want out of this world with both hands.” Well, she might not have put as big an emphasis on being kind. But as your mother, I must insist.

Wave to the crowd,” I said, smiling. “Like we’re the goddamn queens of England.” Celia smiled brightly and did exactly as I did. We stood there, in black and green, redhead and blonde, one of us all ass and the other all tits, waving to the crowd as if we ruled them. Ruby and Joy were nowhere to be seen. And the crowd roared for us.

Camila: What is it they say? The days are long but the years are short? Whoever said that was a mom with three kids under the age of three. Tired and cranky on an hourly basis, bursting with joy when you put your head on the pillow. Raising kids is hard work. It was work I was happy to do, though. Everybody is good at something. I was good at motherhood.

Joy is a well-made object, equalled only by the joy of making it.

Because lately it’s happiness and fear, joy and sorrow, guilt and validation. It is not simply happiness. Simply fear. Simply joy. Simply sorrow.

My ambition has long felt oppressive. It is not a joy––it is a master that I must answer to, a smoke that descends into my life, making it hard to breathe.

if it’s within your power to give another person great joy at little or no expense to yourself— or even at great expense— then you should, especially when you love that person.

Both of us laugh, and I don’t have a shred of guilt for feeling joyful without my father on this earth. This is the tiniest beginning of a terrible, beautiful whole new life.

What’s good is when everyone thinks you’re headed somewhere fast, when you’re all potential. Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.

When she said my name, I swelled with pride and joy and love. I was so goddamn happy for her. And then I did something mortifyingly inane. I kissed the television set.

Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.

The point of prayer is to get above the circumstances. To tap into the joy that is always there, no matter what the circumstances.

My life since Don had been a story of my own making, a mess and a joy of my own decisions, and a string of experiences that landed me with everything I ever wanted.

What’s good is when everybody thinks you’re headed somewhere fast, when you’re all potential. Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.

I will carry you in my heart always, but I cannot carry your loss on my back anymore. If I do, I’ll never find any new joy for myself. I will crumble under the weight of your memory.

Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay. Empty feels like a beginning.

You wake up one morning feeling dry and completely empty, so empty that if someone knocked on you, you’d sound hollow. Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay. Empty feels like a beginning. Which is nice, because for so long you have felt like you were at the end.

She seems very calm, but that bothers me all the more. I'm horrified that she might be accepting of a life that relegates her to empty corner tables, that my daughter might be making do with a minimum of joy.

Let me tell you the sweet spot for being in rock 'n' roll. People think it's when you're at the top but no. That's when you've got the pressure and the expectations. What's good is when everybody thinks you're headed somewhere fast, when you're all potential. Potential is pure fuckin' joy.

Let me tell you the sweet spot for being in rock 'n' roll. People think it's when you're at the top but no. That's when you've got the pressure and the expectations. What's good is when everybody thinks you're headed somewhere fast, when you're all potential. Potential is pure fuckin' joy.

The pain and the joy are locked together, tightly bound. I read the letters over and over again, hoping to separate one from the other, hoping to discern whether love or hate wins out in the end. But it’s like pulling on the ends of a finger trap. The more I try, the tighter they cling to each other.

I did not pick up a racket to grow tense and weary and afraid of failing. I picked it up to feel the joy of smashing a ball as hard as I can. I picked it up to spend time with my dad. This is it. My last moment of what he and I started together. This match. This tiebreaker. I could live in it forever.

You wake up one morning feeling dry and completely empty, so empty that if someone knocked on you, you'd sound hollow. Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you're used to being full of joy. But it's not so bad when you're used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay. Empty feels like a beginning.

I will carry you in my heart always, but I cannot carry your loss on my back anymore. If I do, I’ll never find any new joy for myself. I will crumble under the weight of your memory. I have to look forward, into a future where you cannot be. Instead of back, to a past filled with what we had. I have to let you go

What if I've fucked this all up? I can't let that happen. I have to practice, and I have to plan. I have to work. My ambition has long felt oppressive. It is not a joy—it is a master that I must answer to, a smoke that descends into my life, making it hard to breathe. It is only my discipline, my willingness to push myself harder, that has been my way through.

But beyond these joys, the look and action of numbers, is what they represent. [...] Numbers are an invention of the human mind, and they represent aspects of that mind in ways that are continuously intriguing and often mysterious. [...] What is a calculation but a holding of one constellation of numbers in place while you impact it with another? Such little struggles occur infinitely as we attempt to pin down the elusive elements of existence.

When she said my name, I swelled with pride and joy and love. I was so goddamn happy for her. And then I did something mortifyingly inane. I kissed the television set. I kissed her right on her grayscale face. The clink I heard registered before the pain. And as Celia waved to the crowd and then stepped away from the podium, I realized I’d chipped my tooth. But I didn’t care. I was too happy. Too excited to congratulate her and tell her how proud I was.

But then you feel yourself growing stronger in that bed, as if you’re squeezing the tears out of yourself, wringing yourself dry of pain. You imagine yourself bleeding grief, as if the water from your eyes is the pain itself. You imagine it leaving your body and being soaked up by the mattress. You wake up one morning feeling dry and completely empty, so empty that if someone knocked on you, you’d sound hollow. Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay. Empty feels like a beginning. Which is nice, because for so long you have felt like you were at the end.

Human beings want not only to survive, but also to live. We long to experience life in all its vividness, with full, untrammelled emotion. Adults envy the open-hearted and open-minded explorations of children; seeing their joy and curiosity, we pine for our own lost capacity for wide-eyed wonder. Boredom, rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states. For the addict the drug provides a route to feeling alive again, if only temporarily. “I am in profound awe of the ordinary,” recalls author and bank robber Stephen Reid of his first hit of morphine. Thomas De Quincey extols opium’s power “to stimulate the capacities of enjoyment.

Imagine a life without uncertainty. Hope, according to Aeschylus, comes from the lack of certainty of fate; perhaps hope is inherently blind. Imagine how dull life would be if variables assessed for admission to a professional school, graduate program, or executive training program really did predict with great accuracy who would succeed and who would fail. Life would be intolerable—no hope, no challenge. Thus, we have a paradox. While we all strive to reduce the uncertainties of our existence and of the environment, ultimate success—that is, a total elimination of uncertainty—would be horrific. Knowing pleasant outcomes with certainty would also detract from life’s joy. An essential part of knowledge is to shrink the domain of the unpredictable. But while we pursue this goal, its ultimate attainment would not be at all desirable.

But the past that gives Kiev unique glamour, that made it ‘the City’ to the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and the ‘Joy of the World’ to the medieval chroniclers, is not the brash boom town of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago. From the tenth century to the thirteenth it was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. And here Ukraine’s fight for an identity commences. Generations of scholars have bandied insults about how Rus began, how it was governed, even about how it got its name. But the biggest argument of all is over who Rus belongs to. Did Kievan Rus civilisation pass eastward, to Muscovy and the Russians, or did it stay put, in Ukraine? ‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’ Ukrainians, of course, say Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia – if she mothered anybody, it was the Ukrainians themselves.

But circumcision and abstinence from pork and wine were disagreeable to him: “Drinking,” said he, “is the joy of the Russes, and we cannot exist without that pleasure.”’6 Following this disappointment, he despatched fact-finding missions to research the remaining options. The Jews and Catholic Germans failed to impress. ‘We saw them performing many ceremonies in their temples,’ the emissaries reported back, ‘but we beheld no glory there.’7 But Hagia Sofia bowled the Kievans over: ‘the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations . . .’8

Principle 4: God has sovereignly placed you in this world at this time with the abilities and gifts you have to bring glory to him and show the joy of the gospel to others.

The joy of God equips us with knowledge, freedom, and strength. . . . Our identities and motivations are invested in loving others rather than serving ourselves. And we have the power of the Spirit to help us carry that love through in action. Shame on us if we’re not experts in making the world a better place! This—and nothing else—is what can create a real encounter with the holistic joy of God for people outside the church. If they encounter Christianity through our efforts to leverage secondary assets (politics, scholarship, worldview, evangelism, emotions, causes), they will not encounter the joy of God. But when they see that the total Christian life makes a radical difference in homes, workplaces, and communities, they will want to know why. Then they will know that the joy of God is a real thing. Then they will know that there is a real supernatural power working in the lives of Christians.30

The moral of the story is, faith does not always bring you happiness, wealth or a comfortable lifestyle filled with fun things to do. What faith does bring us is hope while living out God's attitudes of: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, all for the glory of God and the establishment of his kingdom.

The fact is that all roads lead to Rome. Eventually, regardless of what you choose to do, you will end up having the experiences you came here for. You may have spiritual amnesia and find yourself getting lost again and again, but your soul is always right there next to you, waiting for you to wake up and pay attention to what it has to tell you. It will make sure you have the experiences it wants you to have, even when you’re taking every back road and “wrong” turn. Trust it! When you add your light to the sum of Light and co-create wholeheartedly, mindfully, and respectfully in community with others, you are doing what you came here to do. You will be on the right road even if it seems you are taking the long way and wasting time. If you think about it, why wouldn’t you take the scenic route rather than the highway? Are you in a rush to get somewhere? What’s the destination? Get rid of the mentality that you are going “to” some specific place on the map—trying to create some specific situation that will allow you to be happy ever after. Life will always change, and you will always be in motion. So the scenic route is a back road—not the most direct, fastest way to what you think you want to experience. Guess what? You can experience joy, abundance—whatever you seek—wherever you are. And your soul may want something more: the experience of opening your heart and your eyes in compassion. You may have to take a back road to have that experience because you probably don’t have “develop deeper understanding of people who frustrate me” and “experience the bittersweetness of life” on your small self’s list of goals to accomplish. Remember, your soul takes winding paths to get the experiences it wants to have. It is working with Spirit to co-create a reality your small self might not be conscious of—although

This is what happens when one group of Americans are taught generationally to believe they are the sole, true owners of a country their ancestors seized from the indigenous and reaped via the blood and toil of others they never viewed as fully human. (1/6/2021 on Twitter)

cooled

You wake up one morning feeling dry and completely empty, so empty that if someone knocked on you, you’d sound hollow. Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay.

This is the epiphany, the gift, from those who have crossed over to the realm beyond the veil: We don’t have to carry around the pain, the shame, or the belief that somehow what happened to us was our fault or that we are unworthy of what we desire—love, joy, acceptance, expression, and belonging. We are powerful co-creators with Spirit. We no longer have to go by the old, familiar maps that were etched into being by those experiences. When we’re lost, we all want a map—but maps can only tell us where we’ve been. They can only reflect the past and our memories of experiences. But we are headed into places uncharted, into an unknown future that has not yet been imagined. Where are you going? What do you want to co-create?

I don’t know if there is a right and wrong way to grieve. I just know that losing you has gutted me in a way I honestly didn’t think was possible. I’ve felt pain I didn’t think was human. At times, it has made me lose my mind. (Let’s just say that I went a little crazy up on our roof.) At times, it has nearly broken me. And I’m happy to say that now is a time when your memory brings me so much joy that just thinking of you brings a smile to my face. I’m also happy to say that I’m stronger than I ever knew. I have found meaning in life that I never would have guessed. And now I’m surprising myself once again by realizing that I am ready to move forward. I once thought grief was chronic, that all you could do was appreciate the good days and take them along with the bad. And then I started to think that maybe the good days aren’t just days; maybe the good days can be good weeks, good months, good years. Now I wonder if grief isn’t something like a shell. You wear it for a long time and then one day you realize you’ve outgrown it. So you put it down. It doesn’t mean that I want to let go of the memories of you or the love I have for you. But it does mean that I want to let go of the sadness. I won’t ever forget you, Jesse. I don’t want to and I don’t think I’m capable of it. But I do think I can put the pain down. I think I can leave it on the ground and walk away, only coming back to visit every once in a while, no longer carrying it with me. Not only do I think I can do that, but I think I need to. I will carry you in my heart always, but I cannot carry your loss on my back anymore. If I do, I’ll never find any new joy for myself. I will crumble under the weight of your memory. I have to look forward, into a future where you cannot be. Instead of back, to a past filled with what we had. I have to let you go and I have to ask you to let me go. I truly believe that if I work hard, I can have the sort of life for myself that you always wanted for me. A happy life. A satisfied life. Where I am loved and I love in return. I need your permission to find room to love someone else. I’m so sorry that we never got the future we talked about. Our life together would have been grand. But I’m going out into the world with an open heart now. And I’m going to go wherever life takes me. I hope you know how beautiful and freeing it was to love you when you were here.

What does it mean to be a mother? But that was the trick. There was no one meaning. Motherhood was her, was Cathy, was Reid’s mom, was this monstrosity in the bowels of a Manhattan skyscraper. Motherhood was joy, was pain, was standing over the crib with a knife, was standing over the crib with a lullaby. Motherhood was breakage, was expansion, was depletion, was fulfillment, was creation, and an endless series of goodbyes. Motherhood was contradiction. That was its beauty. That was its horror. And if it drove you mad trying to square its inconsistencies, well, tough luck, because motherhood cared nothing about what happened inside of you. Motherhood had already taken what it needed from inside of you and had given it to the world. Anything else was up to you and fate.

Scientists and engineers tend to divide their work into two large categories, sometimes described as basic research and directed research. Some of the most crucial inventions and discoveries of the modern world have come about through basic research—that is, work that was not directed toward any particular use. Albert Einstein’s picture of the universe, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Niels Bohr’s blueprint of the atomic nucleus, the Watson-Crick “double helix” model of DNA—all these have had enormous practical implications, but they all came out of basic research. There are just as many basic tools of modern life—the electric light, the telephone, vitamin pills, the Internet—that resulted from a clearly focused effort to solve a particular problem. In a sense, this distinction between basic and directed research encompasses the difference between science and engineering. Scientists, on the whole, are driven by the thirst for knowledge; their motivation, as the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman put it, is “the joy of finding things out.” Engineers, in contrast, are solution-driven. Their joy is making things work. The monolithic idea was an engineering solution. It worked around the tyranny of numbers by reducing the numbers to one: a complete circuit would consist of just one part—a single (“monolithic”) block of semiconductor material containing all the components and all the interconnections of the most complex circuit designs. The tangible product of that idea, known to engineers as the monolithic integrated circuit and to the world at large as the semiconductor chip, has changed the world as fundamentally as did the telephone, the light bulb, and the horseless carriage. The integrated circuit is the heart of clocks, computers, cameras, and calculators, of pacemakers and Palm Pilots, of deep-space probes and deep-sea sensors, of toasters, typewriters, cell phones, and Internet servers. The National Academy of Sciences declared the integrated circuit the progenitor of the “Second Industrial Revolution.” The first Industrial Revolution enhanced man’s physical prowess and freed people from the drudgery of backbreaking manual labor; the revolution spawned by the chip enhances our intellectual prowess and frees people from the drudgery of mind-numbing computational labor. A British physicist, Sir Ieuan Madlock, Her Majesty’s Chief Science Advisor, called the integrated circuit “the most remarkable technology ever to hit mankind.” A California businessman, Jerry Sanders, founder of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., offered a more pointed assessment: “Integrated circuits are the crude oil of the eighties.” All

Travel back to oneself… I had always imagined that the word referred to forward linear travel… now I wonder if the trajectory might not be circular; you spiral around and, somewhere behind where you were, you come upon your former self, a self that is somehow changed. You’re a child again, yet not exactly: a creature who possesses something you once possessed—innocence, perhaps, or courage or joy—but who is equipped this time around to hold on to whatever it was you lost.

In March 2019, I went on MSNBC and proclaimed to AM Joy host Joy Reid:

Jesus also told us to keep his commands not out of fear of his wrath, but so that our joy would be made full (John 15:10–11 ESV).

One day, when Emira would say good-bye to Briar, she’d also leave the joy of having somewhere to be, the satisfaction of understanding the rules, the comfort of knowing what’s coming next, and the privilege of finding a home within yourself.

The divorce papers had finally been signed and her ex had all but disappeared from our lives—though I made it my business to keep tabs on the man—Jenn’s momma had buried herself in party planning, seemed to find joy in being exhausted by details.

Loving a child was the most bittersweet joy, maybe the most difficult thing in the world. I wanted to tell her, she could do her best and her child might see it as all wrong. She would know soon enough, this terrible chain of love, from mother to child, how the love was not always returned in the same measure, how it can hurt as deeply as it could be sublime.

I should have created more happy moments for her when she was a child, seeds of joy to grow on. Elias had given her so many. But I was stingy and too bitter to share what little hope I had stored away. If I had given her something more, she would have that now. She would see me differently.

Damn, he felt good. If Russian literature and tragic novels had taught me one thing it was this: disappointment and heartache might be around the next corner. But adventure, love, joy, and happiness—the living of a rich, meaningful life—was now.

How would that be? To have a parent interested in what brought you joy? To have a parent who valued the actual relationship over the value of having the relationship?

One day, when Emira would say good-bye to Briar, she'd also leave the joy of having somewhere to be, the satisfaction of understanding the rules, the comfort of knowing what's coming next, and the privilege of finding home within yourself (209)

To Jackson, she may have been merely beautiful. To me, she existed as a multi-dimensional angel and devil, owner of my heart, my joy and my pain, light-years beyond beautiful, or celestial, or exquisite. Because when I saw Jenn, I saw all of her, all versions of her, and all our history, and all the wonderous and frightening possibilities of our future.

disappointment and heartache might be around the next corner. But adventure, love, joy, and happiness—the living of a rich, meaningful life—was now.

She felt as if a bit of herself was sliding from her womb, and for a moment she felt diminished, as if she were giving too much away. The regret was fleeting. For in chaos, the one would become many, and the many would travel along diverse roads and to goals that seemed equally diverse but were, in effect, one and the same. In the end there would be one again, and it would be as it had been. This was rebirth more than birth; this was growth more than diminishment or separation. This was as it had been through the millennia and how it must be for her to persevere through the ages to come. She was vulnerable now—she knew that—and so many enemies would strike at her, given the chance. So many of her own minions would deign to replace her, given the chance. But they, all of them, held their weapons in defense, she knew, or in aspirations of conquests that seemed grand but were, in the vast scale of time and space, tiny and inconsequential. More than anything else, it was the understanding and appreciation of time and space, the foresight to view events as they might be seen a hundred years hence, a thousand years hence, that truly separated the deities from the mortals, the gods from the chattel. A moment of weakness in exchange for a millennium of surging power…. So, in spite of her vulnerability, in spite of her weakness (which she hated above all else), she was filled with joy as another egg slid from her arachnid torso. For the growing essence in the egg was her.

So here’s my final piece of advice: don’t give up. Don’t stop believing in yourself, in your dreams, in the goodness of the world. Don’t let fear or doubt or failure hold you back. Because you? You’re amazing. You’re capable of incredible things. And you deserve a life that makes you happy, a life that fills you with joy and purpose and love. Keep going. Keep growing. Keep living. And above all, keep believing—because the best is yet to come.

It didn’t take much reading of the Bible though, to convince me that two wrongs would not make the situation any different, and that I couldn’t hate the white man, and at the same time hope to convert him.

I will carry you in my heart always, but I cannot carry your loss on my back anymore. If I do, I'll never find ay new joy for myself. I will crumble under the weight of your memory.

People think it’s when you’re at the top but no. That’s when you’ve got the pressure and the expectations. What’s good is when everybody thinks you’re headed somewhere fast, when you’re all potential. Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.

My ambition has long felt oppressive. It is not a joy––it is a master that I must answer to, a smoke that descends into my life, making it hard to breathe. It is only my discipline, my willingness to push myself harder, that has been my way through.

Joan was always curious what it was like on the inside of a marriage. What happened when it was just the two of them at home, Duke and Kris? Did she have to ask him for permission to buy new clothes? Did he sometimes tell her he didn’t like what she made for dinner? Joan tried to ward off the sadness that always came when she pictured a marriage—any marriage. Her parents’ marriage seemed fine to her. Good, even. They still loved each other. Her mother, basically a vegetarian, made her father’s favorite meatloaf most weekends with a joy that Joan had scrutinized for years but found completely sincere. Still, when she thought about it, a gloom dared to take over. You could develop your personality your entire life—pursue the things you wanted to learn, discover the most interesting parts of yourself, hold yourself to a certain standard—and then you marry a man and suddenly his personality, his wants, his standards subsume your own? Joan knew that society was changing and some men were changing with it. Some of them now understood that a woman’s career, her life, her passions were just as important as their own. But still, all Joan could think was that it was now just two people cutting off parts of themselves to make themselves fit together. A world of vegetarians cooking meatloaf.