Brianna Wiest

It’s hard to feel like physical appearance doesn’t take precedence when it’s our chief focus.

Hard work will not always equate to success.

I am most grateful I never got what I thought I deserved.

Give better goodbyes.

You’re the one their significant other really has to win over.

You can’t go beyond your saturation point. You can’t let yourself regress. If your paths are diverging, let them.

Books. Actual hard copy books that you can scribble notes in and mark off sections of and smell ink through and hear the sound of turning pages and bending spines while you read.

But what actually ends up happening is that things get pulled so far out of context they become repurposed just for the sake of an argument.

We lose the mystery, the intangible but palpable reality of our existence, one that’s both elusively foreign and so comfortably, warmly home.

Being happy that someone else has failed.

What your parents didn’t give you.

Intelligence is not measured by exams, creativity not by output, desire not by action and honesty not by circumstance.

You don’t have to tell people you date that you come as a package deal. They know. And if they don’t, they will when they’re laying next to you the next morning while you’re on the phone with said best friend telling them everything that happened last night.

I don’t think love is always a huge, cataclysmal emotional event. I think sometimes it sits in front of you for a very long time until you glance over and say, oh, there you are. I don’t think it’s your saving grace. I think it’s the hand that you hold while you save yourself.

I don’t know what perfect is. I don’t know what it means to me anymore, so I won’t even pretend to know what it means to anybody else.

You shouldn’t have to wait until all the big things in your life are gone before you realize that the small things will save you.

Believe that because someone doesn’t show love the way that they do, that it simply isn’t there.

And if I want to try being a waitress for the sheer fact that I think the work that gets you knee-deep in the human experience is more important than work that pays you well, and you want to dub me an idiot for that because I don’t have to do it, then so be it.