“History is made by people who stared, blinking, into the uncertain future. Their paths were not lit before them by sacred meteors. For most of us, this sounds like good news. We choose and choose and choose again.”
“It’s easy to imagine letting go when we forget that choices are luxuries, allowing us to maintain our illusion of control. But until those choices are plucked from our hands—someone dies, someone leaves, something breaks—we are only playing at surrender.”
“Everybody pretends that you only die once. But that’s not true. You can die to a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life.”
“To so many people, I am no longer just myself. I am a reminder of a thought that is difficult for the rational brain to accept: our bodies might fail at any moment.”
“It never occurred to me that every life must be constantly reinvented by adventures and private jokes, and that it might, suddenly, end.”
“It is a strange fact that sometimes the people who love you most will be among the first to stop worrying about you.”
“But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more.”
“Our lives are not problems to be solved. We can have meaning and beauty and love, but nothing even close to resolution.”
“All of our masterpieces, ridiculous. All of our striving, unnecessary. All of our work, unfinished, unfinishable. We do too much, never enough, and are done before we’ve even started. It’s better this way.”
“We lose every day. Which is why we will never have enough endless love, friends, and carbs.”
The Washington Post: Kate Bowler takes on the self-help industrial complex
Kirkus Reviews: A sensitive memoir of survival.