You Better Be Lightning

I know most people try hard to do good and find out too late they should have tried softer.

Regret is a time machine to the past. Worry is a time machine to the future. Gratitude is a time machine to the present.

Good Grief Let your heart break so your spirit doesn't.

Is my attention on loving, or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?

If we never deny the inevitable end of the story, we will write it more beautiful while we're alive.

If every heart-worthy novelist weeps for days before killing off a beloved character, god must have spent centuries sobbing be- fore pressing a pen to the page of this year.

I will refuse to call it heaven if the people I love (who put me through hell) aren't there.

Bitterness is the easiest way to leave this world having had only a near-life experience.

Even on my worst days, my scars are the backroads where kids sneak out their windows and drive through the night to hear poetry.

To make up for lost time, you need only to put down the grudge you are holding so you can pick up the phone and say, How many days did we need each other at the same time without knowing it? Bitterness is the easiest way to leave this world having had only a near-life experience.

NO SUCH THING AS THE INNOCENT BYSTANDER Silence rides shotgun wherever hate goes.

because where I come from beauty is in the eye of anyone who sees what's missing but can't stop pointing to what's still there. If there's no definition of love yet -- I think that's a good one.

[...] Friend, you are who taught me that a difficult life is not less worth living than a gentle one. Joy is just easier to carry than sorrow, and you could lift a city from how long you've spent holding what's been nearly impossible to hold. This world needs those who know how to do that. Those who can find a tunnel with no light at the end of it and hold it up like a telescope to show that the darkness contains many truths that can bring the light to its knees. Grief astronomer, adjust the lens, look close. Tell us what you see.

For years to come, nothing will have the potential to devastate me more than listening to a child try to make her life sound easier than it is.

Many of these girls are not wanted by their families, and there are few things that make it harder to want to stay alive, she said,

If we never deny the inevitable end of the story, we will write it more beautiful while we’re alive.

The moon rising over the continental divide. My girlfriend and I thought it was a car driving off a cliff, and suddenly nothing in the world was dying. You ever felt that? A split second when nothing in the world is dying? 888 goosebumps.

You've walked on water so many times you know grace is super, super slippery. There's literally nothing anyone is more likely to fall from.

If your wounds are still open, trust they are doors to an answer, and walk through. What if we don't have to be healed to be whole?

I am so much of who I dreamed I'd be when I grew up, and what does the boy you once were think of the man you became?

None of these girls are shocked by the hurt that hunts them -- they expect the blade of this life to keep cutting and ask it to whittle them into someone too sharp to touch.

Healing was learning no one has ever laid a fingerprint on the part of me that's infinite.

I had the youngest soul in the universe. I was so brand new I thought reincarnation was a flower I would wear on my wrist

I’ve had many jobs before this one and will have many after, but this is where I learn one of the most vital lessons: if your own story is one you aren’t sure you can survive, remove whatever sharpness you can from another person’s life.

month into the job, I can’t look at any of the girls without seeing my baby sister’s face the first time someone hurt her on purpose. It wasn’t my sister’s grief so much as her shock that stuck with me. None of these girls are shocked by the hurt that hunts them— they expect the blade of this life to keep cutting and ask it to whittle them into someone too sharp to touch.

In any moment, on any given day, I can measure my wellness by this question: Is my attention on loving, or is my attention on who isn't loving me?

I don’t want my sense to be common,