Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by Jana. #LetsDiscuss is hosted by FYFA and ITAM.

1. Longing & disappointment

That longing ache of desperately wanting something I never actually had in the first place, I’m learning, is the pain of true disappointment.

~ The Rule of One

2. Character entrance

“Excuse me, sir, but unless you wish to finance a liar and swindler, you should not purchase a thing from this man.”

~ The Watchmaker’s Daughter

3. Be like Elsa and let it go

When the only reason to keep something is because you feel guilty getting rid of it, repeat after me: “Fuck it.” Be grateful you had the thing when you needed or wanted it, and then let that shit go.

~ Tidy the F*ck Up: The American Art of Organizing Your Shit

4. You own what happened to you

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, “We *told* you not to tell.” But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.

~ Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

5. The pee planets

Just like the cosmonauts and their pee planets, all we have is each other.

~ Sunstorm

6. Stories aren’t for escaping

We don’t turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.

~ Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Novel

7. Intimacy

People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is “you’re safe with me” — that’s intimacy.

~ The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

8. The past is prologue

You carry the past with you. Even if there’s a before, and an after, in your life. It’s still the same life. The trick is to build a bridge between that and what comes later.

~ Long Black Veil

9. Children.

Children are nothing but a problem people create and then congratulate themselves on solving.

~ Sisterland

They congratulate themselves by writing parenting books when, really, they’ve just gotten lucky. That’s why there’s so many of them and publishing houses keep putting out more.

Parenting books are essentially creating something out of clay and selling it to someone as a “surprise” because you don’t know how it will actually affect them — whether they’ll like it or not, or how it will affect their lives — and not allowing any returns.

Thus, for the parents referring to these books, their children become experiments.

10. Somebody to love me

And it dawned on me that I had not designed the questionnaire to find a woman I could accept, but to find someone who might accept me.

~ The Rosie Project

Isn’t that essentially what we look for in life partners after all? And so, I adhere to the hope that someone will accept me even when I have no chill — when all I can say to them is, “Cool, cool, cool,” not because I’m uninterested, but because they ignite in me a fire that puts out that chill — that makes me wish I had chill — even if it’s just in the way they carry themselves.

Masculine women have a something that I don’t know how to explain. They can be any variation of it, and I’m done for.