“You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again.”

“You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again.”

“I built an idea in my head of the hero I wanted to be, a grab bag of traits from heroes, villains, and side characters. I did not have book role models, I had book blueprints.But there remained a huge gap between the person I wanted to be and the person who I was. This was because no matter how many book blueprints I had, as much as I wanted to make myself the hero of my own life, it didn’t matter as long as I kept telling the story wrong.Nowadays, as a storyteller, I know what the problem was. I had all the elements I needed to tell a good story. But I was telling it the wrong way, so I could never get to the ending I wanted.If you tell yourself you’re a winner, you know what kind of story you’re telling, and you will march toward that... Likewise, if you tell yourself you’re a loser, you’ve made that your story, and you will march toward that instead. The same setbacks could happen in the loser’s story as in the winner’s story, but the self-defined loser would let them be proof that they were never going to be anything.Here’s the story I was telling myself back when I was little edible child waiting to be carried away by hawks and making OCD rituals for herself: once upon a time, there was a girl who was afraid of everything. When I was 16, I realized that I knew what this story looked like and how it ended, and it wasn’t the life I wanted for myself. If I wanted my ending to look different, I needed to change the kind of story I was telling about myself. I needed to shape my events into a different genre: once upon a time, there was a woman who was afraid of nothing. At age 16, I legally changed my name from my birthname — Heidi — to one I thought sounded like the hero I wanted to be: Maggie. And I vowed that I would never be afraid of anything ever again.Did it work? No, of course not. Not right away. But it became a mission statement, my hero’s journey.”

“The hard fact of friendship is that you need to make time for new friends by first stripping out the people who are using your energy in an unsatisfying way. You have to take that risk of being friendless to make room in your life for others who will be your new best friends”

“I fell for her in summer, my lovely summer girlFrom summer she is made my lovely summer girlI'd love to spend a winter with my lovely summer girlBut I'm never warm enough for my lovely summer girlIt's summer when she smiles, I'm laughing like a childIt's the summer of our lives; we'll contain it for a whileShe holds the heat, the breeze of summer in the circle of her handI'd be happy with this summer if it's all we ever had.”

“It was possible that I'd thrown one too many Molotov cocktails over God's fence.”

“I am an equation that only she solves, These X's and Y's by other names called, My way of division is desperatley flawed, while I multiply days without her.”

“Sam came around the side of the car and stopped dead when he saw me. “Oh my God, what is THAT?” I used my thumb and middle finger to flick the multicolored pom-pom on top of my head. “In my language, we call it a HAT. It keeps my ears warm.” “Oh my God,” Sam said again, and closed the distance between us. He cupped my face in his hands and studied me. “It’s horribly cute.” He kissed me, looked at the hat, and then he kissed me again. I vowed never to lose the pom-pom hat.”

“One day a wolf bit a man and the man caught it. Magic or science, it's all the same. The only thing magical about it is that we can't explain it." ~Sam”

“I never knew there were so many different ways to say good-bye”

“The most dangerous and wonderful creature alive is the human.”

“Somewhere close bye, a man is moaning; he's been trampled or thrown or bitten. He sounds resentful or surprised. Did no one tell him that pain lives in this sand, dug in and watered with our blood?”