Book detail: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book offers a compilation of heartfelt and practical advice on matters of love, relationships, and personal growth, drawn from the author’s own life experiences and profound understanding of human emotions and situations.
The quotes below use the same card format as the rest of the site, including topics, source notes, copy actions, image creation, and sharing controls.
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“Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“We are savages insides. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed. There isn't a person reading this who hasn't at one point or another had that why not me? voice pop into the interior mix when something good has happened to someone else.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Can I convince the person about whom I'm crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Be brave enough to break your own heart.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“The only way out of a hole is to climb out.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Wanting to leave is enough.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Write like a motherfucker.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on in length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core: Can I convince the person about whom I am crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t “mean anything” because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it and that it's not crazy to fear you'll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“You get to define the terms of your life.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word 'love' to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“And every last one of us can do better than give up.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“No' is golden. 'No' is the kind of power the good witch wields. It's the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“There is a path toward the light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you're doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
“Jump high and hard with intention and heart.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There