Grieving doesn't make you imperfect. It makes you human.

So I learned another system: When in doubt, keep it out – out of earshot, out of the house – even if this meant, really, just keeping it in.

Once, she'd been a pro at decompressing, loved to sit on the back deck of the beach house in one of our splintery Adirondack chairs for hours at a time, staring at the ocean. She never had a book or the paper or anything else to distract her. Just the horizon, but it kept her attention, her gaze unwavering. Maybe it was the absence of thought that she loved about being out there, the world narrowing to just the pounding of the waves as the water moved in and out.

It shouldn't be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder ― or impossible ― to lose.

But you only get so many do-overs in this life, so many chances to, if not change your past, alter your future.

Lifestyle is an terrible, unpleasant put to not have a very finest buddy.

It is kind of hard to hold a lot in. But for me… it’s sometimes even harder to let it out.