“When I was a little girl, I had a friend and sometimes I wondered if he was born on the day the Titanic sank.”

You are permitted to be cruel sometimes, and you are allowed to fall apart, and feel every emotion they tell you not to feel.

I am more powerful than I am damaged and I will rise from any abyss you drown me in.

And she needs no prince or knight to save her, because her might is enough to tame dragons.

Survival is ugly. Healing is messy. Self-love is complicated.

So when they ask you what you weigh, you don’t need to look down at any scale. Instead, simply tell them the truth; tell them how you weigh whole universes and storms and scars and stories, too.

Before we had mouths or language or hope, we still had love. I know it’s not much. But my god, it’s beautiful and on so many days it is enough.

If a woman does not fit the shape of what you think a woman should, if a woman is not obedient, does not see things the way you do, if a woman is too independent to need anything more than herself, does she automatically become a threat filled with such terror to you?

It has taken me some time to learn that although karma exists, you can let your hatred go, not by destroying your own magic but by letting it grow.

The worst story I know is my heart. The best story I know is my heart. Both these truths know how to exist together in ways I never thought I will learn. This is the quietest of victories.

Love someone who is kinder to you than you are to yourself.

Listen to me girl, you have castles inside your bones, coronets in your heart, if he threatens you with a battle, you raise him a whole war, the last time I checked, queens cover before no man.

Somedays I am more wolf than woman. And I am still learning how to stop apologizing for my wild.

And darling, I hope your remember to kiss the ghosts goodnight. They are only older versions of you that you have had to discard and forget.

Grandmothers are a gift not to be taken lightly. So many lose them, before they are old enough to know their magic. I am glad my bones were born with this knowledge.

That growth is simply learning how to suffer, gracefully, elegantly constantly moving and travelling without letting your pain tear you apart.

You need not fear the wolves you hide in your soul. They were made not to hurt you, but to protect you against this world.

When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, ‘It’s not the days that are old, it’s you that’s old.’ I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.

When you have arrived at your country house and have saluted your household, you should make the rounds of the farm the same day, if possible; if not, then certainly the next day.

Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.

If I advance; follow me. If I retreat; kill me. If I die; avenge me! It is better to live one day as a lion than one-hundred years as a sheep!

You renew yourself every day. Sometimes you’re successful, sometimes your not, but it’s the average that counts.

I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.

I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one’s mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.

Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.