Nora Mcinerny Quotes

Marry a person who loves you a lot, but more important, loves you best, because quality beats quantity any day.

You won’t do it because you are Superwoman, you’ll do it because it’s your life, and there is nobody who can live it for you.

Yes, we have all been broken before. And yes, we could break all over again. The years will roll on. More joy. More pain. More possibility. More yes. More and.

You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to. That’s what your heart is there for.

Marry someone patient. Let's face it, you're not always a walk in the park. And when you throw a fit because you can't find your keys and he says did you check your purse? and you say of course I checked my purse, do you think I'm a moron?? and then you really check your purse, and there are your keys, you want a person who will just shake his head and smile, and call you an idiot under his breath. But lovingly.

You may be the person who says the wrong thing, but that’s better than being the one who says nothing at all.

His happiness was innate, but mine is not. Mine is a choice that I make, a garden that I tend to every single day.

It’s about facing whatever darkness looms over you: your suffering, your sorrow, your sickness, and still putting one foot in front of the other.

This is how I honor Aaron and my father: by making sure their deaths aren’t a black hole that sucked me in, but the spark I needed to be able to burn brighter.

I'm not so worried anymore, because now I know nobody knows what they are doing in life, and nobody knows what to do when bad things happen, to themselves or to other people. We make it up as we go, and sometimes we are big and generous and sometimes we are small and petty. We say the wrong things, we obsess over all the ways we got it wrong and all the ways that other people did, too. The only thing I know for sure it that it is okay not to know everything, to try and fail and to sometimes suck at life, as long as you try to get better.

There is no choice we can make that will help us avoid heartache or suffering or loss, in some measure.

Even if you’re surrounded by people you love, figuring out grief is a solo project.

I wish I could tell my teenage self that loving once makes you better at loving, and better at being loved. That whatever happens with each love, you can carry it all proudly.

There is nothing like people who love who they are, and love what they love.

Someday, the universe will throw a wrench in the works and your well-oiled machine of a life will grind to a halt. And then it will keep going. Because after you got bored of crying and worrying, you took a deep breath and pushed it back into motion.

He will die, I know it, and I go there, though I have no business doing so. Our human imaginations are woefully unprepared for predicting actual pain, but I hack away at it anyway, trying to form a scar before I m even wounded.

Grief is lonely, no matter how many other people feel it. They are different, each one, because we’ve lost different people, different versions of the same men. We are each carrying our own load, and it is ours alone to bear.

It feels as if all unexpected life events blow in all at once, like a summer storm that drops rocks of ice on your lawn on an eighty-degree day. That’s true of the hard things: they arrive with an exclamation mark, sudden and declarative.

There is no syllabus for life that outlines the steps you need to take to graduate to the next event. This life itself is the lesson and the test and there is no dean’s list and no gold stars. There is just the sum of your relationships and your actions, measured by how you feel when you lie down to go to sleep at night, and how many people heart your tweets. I

Let’s all stop pretending that selfies are an aberration of the high art we’re creating with our smart phones or that posting a photo of yourself is somehow an interruption of the high-level discourse we are used to sharing on social media. You know what selfies can show you? Yourself. And you are worth looking at. You are worth marveling at.

We learn as we get older to appreciate the people we love for who they are, and for how they love us.

Ernest Hemingway wrote “the world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger in the broken places.

It is completely bonkers that after we’ve had our heart put through a meat grinder, we just gather up the chunks and say, “Well, let’s try again!

happiness isn’t something that is handed to you, but something you have a hand in making, every day.

When you are an English major, they tell you that you can do anything, but what they really mean is that you could just as easily end up doing nothing.

That is what I’ve felt like all of these months, like I am groping about in the darkness, waking up in a world I hadn’t expected to occupy. But there is no way through it except through it.

Really, you are. I know it doesn’t feel that way because everyone you know seems to be doing a better job at life than you are, but they’re not. They’re just really good at posting happy things to Facebook and Instagram.

You don’t actually have to hang out with people who make you feel exhausted or take little digs at you. You know how everyone has a friend who is basically just mean to them, and you can’t figure out why you are friends with this girl who says things like

I am, I think, finally learning what a prayer is. It is just a thank-you.

I am done trying to reason with it. For now, at least. There is no reason. There is nothing to understand. There is no could-have or should-have because there is only what is.

It is rare and magical when you and your world can accept and love the same version of you. I

You’re thankful for the kind things people say, you forgive the dumb things, but you’re crushed by the silence.

You check your phone in the middle of the workday. Your person has sent you a text. He wants to know how your day is. He’s just taking a second to say hello to his person, and his person is you.

I'm not stronger than anybody. I mean, physically, I can do three pull-ups, so I'm stronger than some people, but emotionally, I'm the same as anyone else. This strength isn't superhuman. It's the most human thing of all, a muscle we're all born with but need to exercise rarely at best. And lucky for us, it's a tenacious little thing that bounces back from atrophy as soon as you need to flex it.

right.Ninety-nine percent of the feedback you get—or fear getting—is of no consequence. There are worse things in life than not being liked, or trying something and failing, and one of them is complacency. A world where we receive zero criticism is a world where we are not contributing, where we are living at the very baseline of our abilities. It is a world where I am not doing the work that fuels me. It is a world where I am smaller for the comfort of others, and for my own safety.

I'm only as good as my next achievement; I allow myself anywhere between five to eight minutes to happiness about any accomplishment before shifting immediately into what's next, and how I can make it better. We are all exhausting, gaping holes of need trying to fill the void with perfection and progress and the pursuit of more and better, aching for a sheet of gold-stars and a grown-up to tell us that we belong here.

Yes, it stressed me out to be asked about my plans for my one (ONE) wild and precious life, but I will still like this phrase every time someone has turned it into art on Pinterest or Instagram. I will try not to let it stress me out. I will try to be better. I will try to bring more love to the world.

I remember trying to explain it to you, and realizing that you had already glazed over and checked out, and I could have said “because one time I saw the face of Jesus in a hot dog and he told me that if I ate him I could have eternal life” and you wouldn’t have noticed. What I want to say to you now, is this: I believe in God now, but not because of Catechism. Not because of what someone told me, or an essay I had to write for credit. I believe in God because I see God every day. I see God in people. I feel God in people. God is not a disinterested Father. God is love. She is air. God is seeing you carry Ralph to the car after your soccer games, in the wrinkling of your baby brother’s nose when you make him smile, in the story of you covering your little sister’s ears so she didn’t hear your mom and dad fighting when you were both so little.

It is rare and magical when you and your world can accept and love the same version of you.

The happiest people in my life are people who did the thing our coaches and parents always told us not to do: They quit.

Even grief is a privilege.

Grief is a byproduct of love. We don’t grieve what we don’t love.

There are few things that we all have in common, no matter where we come from or what we do for a living. We are all born, we all die. And in between, we all suffer. In big ways and small ways.

Be kind,” we post on Facebook, “for everyone you meet is facing a hard battle.” We attribute that quote to everyone from Aristotle to Marilyn Monroe, and then we go about our business doing our best not to look at the hard things. Unless they’re already over, in which case they’re not a hard thing anymore, they’re an obstacle overcome, an enemy vanquished. Now it’s a success story with a happy ending!

Something inside me started to pull me toward people who had also experienced hard things. I lost my taste for fiction and I devoured memoirs, soaking up the experiences of people who lived and felt deeply.

And I saw the river over which every soul must pass to reach the Kingdom of Heaven And the name of that river was suffering. And I saw the boat which carries souls across the river And the name of that boat was love.

I was sure, all the time, that I was doing it wrong. I spent a lot of time looking up from my life and craning my neck around to get a glimpse at everyone else’s paper: How were they adulting, and were they doing it better than me?

I’m opinionated, obstinate, and obsessive. I am quick to anger, quick to cry, quick-witted and a slow runner. A very slow runner. I don’t know if you can really call it running, really. I don’t know what I want. Some heavy making out? Someone to text me for no reason? A person who is absolutely, positively in love with me? It varies, day by day. I know that I want you to play with my hair while we lay on the couch and listen to records. I want you to hold my hand while we’re driving and take out the trash before you’re ever asked. I want you to want me, but not need me. To be there for me without my asking, and to go away without being told. I want you to keep me company and keep your promises. PS: Please, don’t be shorter than me. Chapter Seven Finders Keepers

Anything can happen, and it does, but we cannot live every day with the awareness that we are small and fragile creatures, vulnerable spirits in inadequate vessels made of breakable bones and soft tissue. Parenthood in particular requires that we live in two realities; we must believe that the world will help up keep our children alive while also knowing that our environment is ambivalent at best, that something as small as a peanut or as large as an impressive body of water is all that stands between our child and death.

I can never say it, I can barely even think it, but I know that I am crying because I am afraid that when Aaron is gone, there will still be parts of him I do not know, little things like this that he forgot to share with me. I'd felt that from the moment I met him, before we knew he was sick, but I feel it more urgently now: like I want to just stick a little USB drive into his arm and download everything about him. I want every memory, every feeling, every thought from baby Aaron and child Aaron and punky teenage Aaron, who pierced his ears multiple times.

from the dangers of the entire world. You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to. That’s what your heart is there for.

I've lived a life, I realize, of dirty pain. Of obsession and anxiety, of guilt over not living my own precious life to the fullest, whatever the fuck that even means. Aaron released me from that little self-imposed, self-conscious jail cell. He let me be myself, and he loved me even though I never fully put the cap back on anything when I'm done using it.

The thing is, it is easier for me than it is for some people. I know that even though I miscarried a baby and my dad and husband died a few weeks later, I’m a privileged person. Even grief is a privilege. Some women don’t get to quit their jobs and write a book when their lives explode, they just have to turn up to work the next day and hope they find the time to pick up the pieces of their old lives at a later date.

Bryce had the same reasons for not being there that everyone who wasn’t there had: they didn’t want to ruin their memories of him, they didn’t want to be sad, they were scared, they didn’t know what to do. Nicole Petty would not stand for that. Because Aaron didn’t want to do any of this, either, but he didn’t have a choice. You don’t get to just come to the wedding and the funeral, but skip the middle part because it might make you too sad. That is against the rules.

My sister Meghan was smart and beautiful... if only she'd lose weight. Fat was a concern, an error, something to be cured of; a but between you and everything good. I hated overhearing these comments, hated how they made my ears flush red in embarrassment and anger, hated how they revealed a secret side of life where even the people who love you the most could also be privately cataloging your flaws. What did they not like about me? What ways could I be improved upon? I hated even more how relieved I was to be skinny, and what a coward I was to overhear all this and say nothing in defense of the people I loved.

These are the diamonds I picked from the darkness, that shine with meaning only for me.

The world will keep spinning, and your life will get a little bit better every time you give up on the shit that is taking you away from your one wild and precious life.

You are twenty-two chronologically, but situations such as ours have a way of aging us, of packing the wisdom of many more decades into us very quickly.

That miscarriage had been the first in a Triple Crown of losses that happened so quickly one after the other I didn’t even have time to be sad about the first one.

After Aaron’s death I developed a bad habit of starting any book I was reading by flipping to the last page. Out of context that page made no sense, but as the story progressed, remembering those last three hundred words or so made me feel safe. This was all going somewhere. It would be resolved. All I wanted was to be able to flip to the last page of this part of my life, and know that whatever I chose to do next, things would turn out all right. That’s not the way books are intended to be read, and it’s not the way life can be lived.

He can say he forgives me, sure, but I know better. In therapy, I work on forgiving myself.

He will learn that the best way to keep people comfortable is to hide your own discomfort or deny it entirely. He will learn to fake it until he makes it, to betray himself in a million ways, just like his mother. I don't know when I learned that "dine" was the correct answer to "how are you?" but nobody ever had to explicitly tell me that "Well, I'm teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown" is definitely not the answer your colleague is looking for while you pass each other in the hallways between your many overlapping meetings. It doesn't take a psychology degree to understand that some things are just more pleasant than others, and that as comfort-seeking mammals with disposable income we are attracted to the pleasant, the way. And yes, we know that "lie is hard," but we also really want it to be hard in ways that are manageable and more inconvenient than difficult. We want our setbacks to be setting us up for comebacks, and more than anything, we want to be able to alchemize our pain into something shiny and good: a lesson learned, a warning sign for others. Our suffering is just a vehicle for our self-improvement.

How frightening to know that your brain can betray you this way, that the vessel for our sense of self is often faulty and prone to error. How awful to know that death may come for us over and over, snatching pieces of us little by little until all that is left to take is our body.

Because no, this is not what happens on my version of the internet, where opinions are either inconsequential (what does your coffee mug really say about you?) or authoritative, loud and devoid of all nuance.

I hope that all my children live free of any rhyming aphorism that encourages them to keep striving when it’s clear that C’s not only get degrees but produce C-suite executives.

Anxiety is a serious and sometimes debilitating mental health issue that affects millions of people worldwide, but when you’re, say, trying to explain to another person who has not fallen down the spiral staircase of your worst thoughts why exactly you’re unable to walk through a grocery store without imagining every single can, shelf, and cart rotting in a future landfill, poisoning our soil and returning as radioactive carrots and kale, you have to admit that it’s also… a little embarrassing.

To admit this—a hopelessly unfashionable addiction to the appearance of my body—is a crime in some circles. It's much more becoming to "embrace your flaws" or—even better—to not see your body's flaws at all, to firmly believe that your physical appearance is immaterial and unimportant, that your body is simply a vessel for your soul and your personality. Personally, I've found the undoing of generations of social conditioning to be slow going.

Go in there and be a woman,” she said, and even though I had no idea what she meant, I did it.

I am creating my own path through my own grief, toward my own version of happiness. TO

I’ve been alone—and lonely—before, though they aren’t the same thing. Taylor

Don’t try to win over the haters, you’re not the jackass whisperer. —BRENÉ

Treat them real special, real nice. Send a jet for them tonight because they can have whatever they liiiiiiiiike. They can have whatever they liiiiiike.

In the words of Amy Grant, it takes a little time, sometimes, to get the Titanic turned back around. That’s an unfortunate lyric, given the fate of the Titanic. And I think it’s also a poor excuse for complacency. Things change when people care enough to change them, and people can change, when they care to.

I did this partially because Matthew is the kind of person for whom the internet is simply a utility: a font of information and nothing more. He has the supernatural ability to look at his phone only when he needs to, and the idea of posting something about his life on the internet in a way that strangers can view is a concept he cannot grasp. So yes, I was partially trying to respect his privacy, but I was mostly trying to protect myself. From the judgment of others, which was primarily just a projection of my own self-judgment. There was a version of me that thought loving another person would somehow diminish the love I still felt for Aaron. A version of me that thought that if I was happy, I must not be sad anymore, and if I wasn’t sad anymore, then I guess I didn’t love Aaron as much as I said I did. Or maybe that my new happiness was ill-gotten, a well-made fake, something I swiped off the back of a truck when nobody was looking. This is what life looks like when you water the seeds of joy with guilt and shame. It feels as good as it sounds. When bad things happen to you—a death, an illness, a divorce, a job loss—you quickly go from being a person to being just a sad story. I know from experience that nobody wants to be a sad story, and that no matter what you’ve been through, your story is always so much more than just sad. And your happy stories are more than just happy. Obviously, everything is more complicated than it appears on Instagram. But it is incredibly difficult to live with complicated. It is even more difficult for other people to deal with complicated.

Should happens (sorry). And when your life falls apart, should happens even more.

New York teaches you to be addicted to discomfort, but Minneapolis makes it so easy to be comfortable.

You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to.

When I come to in the morning, before I’m fully awake, I have this vague, weighty sense of unease, as if there is something radically wrong with the world, and I don’t quite know what it is. Then I remember. We continue to grope about in the darkness. They are in the light.

Guilt says I did something bad and shame says I am bad.

I thought love could be born out of persistence, that given the right circumstances and the right amount of weed and alcohol, I could certainly convince a guy to love me.

Unexpected goodness is as large and overwhelming as unexpected tragedy. It feels as if all unexpected life events blow in all at once, like a summer storm that drops rocks of ice on your lawn on an eighty-degree day. That’s true of the hard things: they arrive with an exclamation mark, sudden and declarative. But the good things are different. Looking back, you always see that they took their time.

We humans are experts at hiding our broken parts.

The change of three letters makes all the difference: in how that reads, in how it feels, in how it lives. Because but makes our hearts and possibilities so much smaller than they are. And is where it’s at. And is where I am now. And does not deny the past, or the pain. And makes room for it, in a way that but does not. And allows for the future, too. And makes room for the multitudes included in all our experiences.

the world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger in the broken places.

I couldn't talk about my happiness without touching on the uncomfortable truth that everything I have now is built on everything I lost.

This is life after life after life, in all of the chaos and contradiction of feelings and doings and beings involved. There will be unimaginable joy in incomprehensible tragedy. There will be endings. But there will be no happy endings.

Don't should yourself. And don't let anyone should on you, either.

These shoulds that were so kindly offered to me assumed that chaos can be managed; that every problem has an answer; that tragedy can be managed if you just follow the plan of the should,

Somewhere between our youngest years and our oldest years, we learn to hide behind shoulds and woulds and coulds instead of feelings and facing what is.

The first year of widowhood is a year of firsts. 365 days where you can say 'Last year, we were -' The blank is filled with everything from the monumental to the mundane.

Our big love grew from a million, tiny considerations of one another.

This is how I honor Aaron and my father. By making sure that their deaths aren't a black hole that sucked me in. The spark I needed to be able to burn brighter.

Choosing a therapist is like dating; it’s supposed to be perfectly acceptable to shop around, to ask questions and figure out if it’s a mutual fit before you move forward into a relationship. But I never dated that way; I either settled for whoever liked me or, in the case of both my marriages, tripped and fell right into the exact right match. Same for therapy.

BE “FINE” How are you? Well, you’re fine, of course! You’ve never been better. I mean, sure, those medical bills are adding up to more than your house is worth, and yeah, you’re not on “speaking terms” with your siblings, and no, you don’t exactly have a job, but overall? When you think of it? Ya can’t complain. Turn the conversation back onto the asker as soon as humanly possible. You’ll immediately find out that they’re just as fine as you are. Wild, right? 3. DI(ALL)Y Help? Who needs help? Not you. You can handle it. Totally. Whatever it is. Three hours in line at the Social Security office, only to find out that your form wasn’t notarized on the third day of the month with Saturn in your fifth house? Not a problem. Two kids with the stomach flu and a job that doesn’t give you paid sick time? You got this. A burning pit of despair growing stronger every day like the Eye of Sauron? All over it. Those cracks you’re starting to feel in that Totally Fine Construct you worked so hard on? That’s the breakdown coming. The cortisol is pumping, your blood pressure is banging, and your body, which doesn’t know the difference between emotional stress and being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger, is freaking the fudge out. Delicious, isn’t it? Don’t worry, there’s more where that came from!

If we all took our personal tragedies and lined them up for comparison, we would find that someone always has it worse, and someone always has it better than us. We'd quickly find ourselves ranking our losses against one another, deciding who deserves more sympathy, more compassion. There is no conversion chart that would help us quantify and weigh the losses, no yardstick we can use to measure them against one another.

Pity keeps our heart closed up, locked away. Empathy opens our heart up to the possibility that the pain of others could one day be our own pain, too. Pity keeps the pain of others at arm's length. It says "That sad thing is happening over there, but it isn't my sad thing." Pity sheds a tear and moves on. Empathy rolls up its sleeves and pitches in.

This is what life looks like when you water the seeds of joy with guilt and shame. It feels as good as it sounds.

It's that fear-that I'm really just space junk-that has seemed to drive every version of myself. I've spent years collecting accomplishments and taking little to no joy or satisfaction in any of them, constnatly thirsting like Tantalus rooted in his pool of water.

Like all men who eventually become conservative old white guys, your grandfather was a dirty hippie when he was young.

Not maliciously, but because people can’t spend their entire lives focused on meeting your needs when they have their own lives to attend to. Why