Chapter 1
[in high school, in the cafeteria at lunch]
"Before I take a step forward I wish vehemently that we had assigned seats. I look out at the sea of faces and understand that we are all drowning in freedom. Where are the adults? We need them here."
[in the hospital being treated for bulimia]
"One day a girl with sliced-up arms says, 'My mom sent me here because she says no one can believe a word I say.' I look at her and I want to say: Does she see that you tell the truth on your arms? Like I tell the truth in the toilet? By the time we landed in the hospital, most of our families considered us insensitive liars, but we didn't start out that way. We started out as ultrasensitive truth tellers. We saw everyone around us smiling and repeating 'I'm fine! I'm fine! I'm fine!' and we found ourselves unable to join them in all the pretending. We had to tell the truth, which was: 'Actually, I'm not fine.' But no one knew how to handle hearing that truth, so we found other ways to tell it. We used whatever else we could -- drugs, booze, food, money, our arms, other bodies. We acted out our truth instead of speaking it and everything became a godforsaken mess. But we were just trying to be honest."
"The hidden, truest rules about how to matter as a girl are: Be Thin. Be Pretty. Be Quiet."
Chapter 4
[on the bathroom floor, facing an unexpected positive pregnancy test]
"...I get stuck on that phrase as it runs through my mind. Free for all. Maybe grace is free. Free for the taking. Maybe it's even free for me. This free-for-all overwhelms me, fill me, covers me, convinces me. I decide to believe. Something in me says yes to the idea that there is a God and that this God is trying to speak to me, trying to love me, trying to invite me back to life. I decide to believe in a God who believes in a girl like me.
"The God I decide to believe in is the God of the bathroom floor. A God of scandalously low expectations. A God who smiles down at a drunk on the floor, wasted and afraid, and says, There you are. I've been waiting. Are you ready to make something beautiful with me?"
[realizing the difficulty of getting sober]
"This is the difference between God and booze. God requires something of us. The booze numbs the pain but God insists on nothing short of healing. God deals only with truth and the truth will set you free, but it will hurt so badly at first."
Chapter 6
[holding her baby for the first time]
"I am this baby's mother. He is mine. I am his. He is the key I've been waiting for my entire life. I am unlocked. Chase and I belong to each other."
Chapter 7
[reading people's responses to her honest Facebook post]
"I marvel at the honesty and pain. Many messages are from people I've known for years, but I'm discovering that I never really knew them. We've spent our time together talking about everything but what matters. We've never brought to each other the heavy things we were meant to help each other carry. We've only introduced each other to our representatives, while our real selves tried to live life alone. We thought that was safer. We thought that this way our real selves wouldn't get hurt. But as I read these messages, it becomes clear that we are all hurting anyway. And we think we are alone. At our cores, we are our tender selves peeking out at a world of shiny representatives, so shame has been layered on top of our pain. We're suffocating underneath all the layers."
Chapter 9
Types of listeners to the news of her marriage -- the Shover, the Comparer, the Reporter, the God Reps, the Victims, etc.
Chapter 10
"The surf continues to hit the sand rhythmically and dependably and I trust it will continue. The sun is setting but I know it will rise again tomorrow. There is a pattern to things. This makes me wonder if I can also trust that there is a pattern, a rhythm, a beauty, a natural rise and fall to my life as well. I wonder if the one holding together this sky might also be capable of holding together my heart. I wonder if the one making this sky so achingly beautiful might also be working to make my life beautiful, too."
"I don't know how to fix my marriage. All I know is that I need to tear down my own walls and face what's underneath . . . I look out at the sea, up at the sky, and down at the sand. I think, I can be brave enough to tear myself down -- because the One holding all of this together will hold me, too."
Chapter 13
"It strikes me that it's always the most religious people who are most surprised by grace . . . We sweep up our mess and hide our doubts, contradictions, anger and fear before showing ourselves to God, which like putting on a fancy dress and makeup to prepare for an X-ray."
"We are all desperate for reunion and we are trying to find it in all the wrong places. We use bodies and drugs and food to end our loneliness, because we don't understand that we're lonely down here because we are supposed to be lonely. Because we're in pieces. To be human is to be incomplete and constantly yearning for reunion."
"Fear doesn't make perfect love untrue any more than passing clouds make the stars untrue. I know how to find my way back to truth, to love, to peace, to God again. All I have to do is be still and breathe and wait for the clouds and fear to pass."
Chapter 15
"But what the hell does sexy even mean? I wonder if the word sexy is everything that made sex a lie to me . . . Sexy was one type of body and one color of hair and spending an entire life looking into the mirror instead of out at the world . . . I'd been trying to be that kind of sexy for twenty years, and I realize that's going to have to change. That definition of sexy is what poisoned my husband and me and it's never going to work for us again . . . Maybe I can find my own sexy."
"Women who are concerned with being pretty think about what they look like, but women who are concerned with being beautiful think about what they are looking at. They are taking it all in. They are taking in the whole beautiful world and making all that beauty theirs to give away to others."
"I consider the possibility that I've been right and wrong my whole life. I was right to want to be beautiful and sexy; I was just wrong to have accepted someone else's idea of what those words mean. It strikes me that I need to throw out the dictionary the world gave me about what it means to be a mother, a wife, a person of faith, an artist, and a woman and write my own."
Unsure which chapter ...
"Be brave because you are a child of God. Be kind because everyone else is, too."
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