"Our culture teaches us about shame--it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren't born craving perfect bodies. We weren't born afraid to tell our stories. We weren't born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren't born with a Pottery Barn catalog in one hand and heartbreaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us--from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate."

--Brene Brown

I Thought It was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame

(via In Community and Resistance)

"The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit."

--Dwight Morrow

(via HappinessRuns...)

"There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness, for these crimes the guilty would never pay. There was no religion and no government that would relieve the hell."

--Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

Compliments

Sometimes it's really hard to be sincere. There's this guy I know, and there's something I want to tell him. Don't even go there--this something is not romantic in any way. I just want to give him a compliment; I just can't figure out how to do it in a way that's a) not socially awkward, and b) that he won't laugh it off like I'm kidding, because I'm seriously not.

He impresses me. Hell, he downright amazes me, and though some of the brightest minds in the country are here, very few people are overall amazing to me. He pushes himself harder than most people I know, in every single aspect of his life, and everything he touches is golden. He's also nice and sweet and I just, I want him to know that I think this highly of him. I admire him.

I have this other friend, who I love equally and admire almost equally, who commented the other day about how I observe too many things about him, things most people would never notice. I wanted to say I watch him because, while it might seem like I'm always trying to change him, I sometimes wish I could be like him.

But people don't say these things. It's a shame.