Thinking

“When you’re a little kid, you’re a little bit of everything: Artist, Scientist, Athlete, Scholar. Sometimes it seems like growing up is a process of giving those things up, one by one.” –Kevin Arnold, The Wonder Years

“I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” –Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

“I spent so much of my time here at Dunder Mifflin thinking about my old pals, my college a cappella group. The weird thing is, now I’m exactly where I want to be. I got my dream job at Cornell, and I’m still just thinking about my old pals. Only now, they’re the ones I made here. I wish there was a way to know you’re in “the good old days,” before you’ve actually left them.” –Andy Bernard, The Office

“I had no idea, of course, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, it was this one, of an abundance of time so great as to routinely be unfillable, that would vanish with the least ceremony.” –Curtis Sittenfeld, You Think It, I’ll Say It

This last one is a 2-parter, a quote within a quote:

“There’s an expression in classical music. It goes, ‘We went out to the meadow.’ It’s for those evenings that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren’t even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling.” –Tom Waits

“I felt like we went out to the meadow tonight, only we weren’t playing music. In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It was like we weren’t even there, lying together by the pool. It felt like we were in some place your body can’t visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments.” –John Green, Turtles All The Way Down