🌹✨ @soakinmidiamonds - Tumblr Blog

But in the peace of these long walks, I begin to relax. I start to see how tightly I’ve been holding myself, how I’ve been trying to keep all my pieces together. On these walks, I begin to allow myself to grieve for what I missed, for who I might have been, what more I might have achieved in my life if I had known how to use the energy I’d poured into surviving toward thriving instead.

— Angelica Glass, Scavenging Beauty: A Memoir in Walks (Riverhead Books, July 7, 2026)

dk-thrive

“a wound in the exact shape / of your words.”

— Sean Thomas Dougherty, from "Why Bother" in The Second O of Sorrow by Sean Thomas Dougherty, published by BOA Editions Ltd., 2015.

dk-thrive

I needed happiness - or rather peace - because the mind and the body cannot go on forever, in doubt and struggle and uncertainty.

— Martha Gellhorn, “Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn” edited by the biographer Caroline Moorehead (Henry Holt and Co., 2006)

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All feelings come and go, and are by their nature ephemeral. But if we don’t train our minds to see that, we end up riding life like the old roller coaster at Coney Island that threatened to hurl people from their seats every now and again.

— Pilar Jennings, from “Fear” in “Fear: An Introduction to the Special Section,” published in the Fall 2017 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

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“Remember that time you were... “Vaguely,” she said... “And yet it didn’t matter,” she said. “All these things we did, if only we knew how little any one of them mattered. You could do a thousand things in a life.” “And then five hundred and twenty more.”

— Dave Eggers, Contrapposto: A Novel (Knopf, June 9, 2026)

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I don’t think of life as a fight. Or a climb.

“You could be happier. Happier on a grander scale.” “Listen to you. Yesterday I was happy with my beach and my one painting. You’re saying I’ll be happier with no beach and six paintings.” ... “You could have done much more.” “Well, I didn’t, and that’s why I’m alive and content.” She took the inference:...“You’re saying you’re happier than me,” she said. “I’m saying you don’t seem content.” “So contentment is all? That’s it? What the fuck is contentment? The only goal is contentment?” “There are many faiths that say so.” “Which ones?” “I can’t remember. It sounded good,” he said, and she laughed... “This isn’t what I want,” he said. “I don’t want to argue. I don’t think of life as a fight. Or a climb."

— Dave Eggers, Contrapposto: A Novel (Knopf, June 9, 2026)

dk-thrive

I crave that feeling you get just before you go to sleep, when everything gives in. The fight ends. The fight of our thinking lives. […] Rest awaits. The relentless ticking clock of your conscious awareness prepares to be smothered, your limbs prepare to go slack, the things that hurt will stop hurting, the whole frenetic circus of it all is about to collapse. There’s nothing for you to do, or work out.

— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (Jonathan Cape, 2020)

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Sometimes it’s nice to be with someone you’ve known for a long time, and other times, not so much.

— Ann Patchett, Whistler (Harper, June 2, 2026)

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How was it that a weekday trip...had plunged me back into childhood at the age of fifty-three? I knew what Leda would say. She would say it was because childhood never leaves us. We seal the room up and cover it in sheetrock. We dry and sand and paint, but the pocket of history remains, and sooner or later someone always winds up tapping on the wall, commenting on the way it sounds strangely hollow in there, and then the whole thing comes tumbling down.

— Ann Patchett, Whistler (Harper, June 2, 2026)

dk-thrive

(We) both have a small shard of glass in our hearts where the other is concerned: her disappointment, my shame, her regret and my regret. This helps to pry it loose. All these years later, you can still pry something loose. There’s no sense carrying shame and regret into the next life.

— Ann Patchett, Whistler (Harper, June 2, 2026)

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People have no understanding of how love works... They don’t take gratitude into account. They don’t think about relief.

— Ann Patchett, Whistler (Harper, June 2, 2026)

smokefalls

What do we talk about when we talk about death? Are we talking about the person who is absent, or about ourselves? Or are we talking about absence itself?