“A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.” George Eliot
Inspirational thoughts
Open mind
“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” George Eliot
Slower
“There’s a virtue in slowness, which we have lost.” Graham Greene
Choices
“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Scar tissue
“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
Criticism
“Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
Family struggles
“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bearing burdens
“His mind tired–tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
Be yourself!
“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”
—Kate Chopin, “The Awakening”
Conscience
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird