“You know what Marshall needs to do. He needs to stop being sad. When I get sad, I stop being sad, and be awesome instead. True story.”

“They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.”

“Dads. Do you not realize that a child is what you tell them they are? That people almost always become what they are labeled? Was whatever your child just did really the “dumbest thing you’ve ever seen somebody do”? Was it really the “most ridiculous thing they ever could have done”? Do you really believe that your child is an idiot? Because she now does. Think about that. Because you said it, she now believes it. Bravo.”

“Dads. It’s time to tell our kids that we love them. Constantly. It’s time to show our kids that we love them. Constantly. It’s time to take joy in their twenty-thousand daily questions and their inability to do things as quickly as we’d like. It’s time to take joy in their quirks and their ticks. It’s time to take joy in their facial expressions and their mispronounced words. It’s time to take joy in everything that our kids are.”

“If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That’s all there is to it.”

“The more you take responsibility for your attitudes, the more you can adjust yourself in a forward thinking manner.”

“كل إنسان يحاول أن يكون أسعد من الآخرين .. والصعوبة هي أننا نبالغ في تقدير سعادة الآخرين”

“We should learn to smile as we fall, So much so as when we have it all.”

“We mistakenly think that by putting ourselves first, we’ll finally get what we want. In fact, true happiness comes not from thinking more of ourselves, but rather from thinking less of ourselves—from seeing the truly small role we play in something much bigger, much more important than our individual needs.”

“I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear.”

“Es dauerte einen Moment, bis er ihr antwortete:Nein, ich spreche von… von eurer Freiheit, glaube ich. Von dem Glück, das ihr habt, für euch zu leben und auf alles andere zu pfeifen.”

“Jealous of the crazy gay kid. That doesn’t sound right.””Hey, Sol,” she said, her tone getting serious for a second. “Those are two things about you out of a million. Don’t box yourself in.”