Only dead fish go with the flow.

Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.

1. If it frightens you, do it.
2. Don’t settle. Every time you settle, you get exactly what you settled for.
3. Put yourself first.
4. No matter what happens, you will handle it.
5. Whatever you do, do it 100%.
6. If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got.
7. You are the only person on this planet responsible for your needs, wants, and happiness.
8. Ask for what you want.
9. If what you are doing isn’t working, try something different.
10. Be clear and direct.
11. Learn to say “no.”
12. Don’t make excuses.
13. If you are an adult, you are old enough to make your own rules.
14. Let people help you.
15. Be honest with yourself.
16. Do not let anyone treat you badly. No one. Ever.
17. Remove yourself from a bad situation instead of waiting for the situation to change.
18. Don’t tolerate the intolerable — ever.
19. Stop blaming. Victims never succeed.
20. Live with integrity. Decide what feels right to you, then do it.
21. Accept the consequences of your actions.

You cannot save people. You can only love them.

These helpless little boys concluded that if they could eliminate or hide all of their needs, then no one would abandon them. They also convinced themselves that if they didn’t have needs, it wouldn’t hurt so bad when the needs weren’t met. Not only did they learn early not to expect to get their needs met, but also that their very survival seemed to depend on appearing not to have needs.

How strange would it be if you met yourself on the street? How strange if you liked yourself, took yourself in your arms, married your own self, propagated by techniques known only to you, and then populated the world? Replicas of you are everywhere. Some are Arabs. Some are Jews. Some live in yurts. It is an abomination, but better that your sweet and scrupulously neat self emerges at many points on the earth to watch the horned moon rise than all those dolts out there, turning into pillars of salt wherever we look. If we have to have people, let them be you, spritzing your geraniums, driving yourself to the haberdashery, killing your supper with a blowgun. Yes, only in the forest do you feel at peace, up in the branches and down in the terrific gorges, but you’ve seen through everything else. You’ve fled in terror across the frozen lake, you’ve found yourself in the sand, the palace, the prison, the dockside stews; and long ago, on this same planet, you came home to an empty house, poured a Scotch-and-soda, and sat in a recliner in the unlit rumpus room, puzzled at what became of you.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit, all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure. So much modern art is the sound of things going out of control. Out of a medium, pushing to its limits and breaking apart.

If you can’t look on the bright side, I will sit with you in the dark

he marveled at how her body fit so perfectly against his: her nose nestled exactly into the hollow between his collarbones; her cheek curved to match the side of his neck. As if they were two halves of a mold. He had studied her with the air of a sculptor, tracing the contours of her hips and calves, his fingertips grazing her skin.

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Irony: a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things

— Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You