When had my fear of broken plates gotten so grandiose? My desire for extravagant moments so small?

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

The monk at St. Meinrad took his hands and placed them on my shoulders, peered straight into my eyes and said, ‘I hope you’ll hear what I’m about to tell you. I hope you’ll hear it all the way down to your toes. When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.

The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't.

We become what we pay attention to.

There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn't have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being me.

You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backwards" -Secret Life of the Bees