This week has been rough. It’s incredibly hard to see someone that you love go through the ickiness of chemotherapy. Particularly when it reminds you too much of the hell that last summer was. So to stave off the roiling waves of PTSD, I decided to grab my camera, and hunt for my favorite summer flowers. Because flowers always make me feel a bit lighter.

As I was thumbing through the flower photos on my camera, one particular quote about flowers, & resilience, came to mind: “Deep in their Roots, all Flowers keep the Light.” A quote, which in turn, opened up the floodgates within my heart, for the words that mean the most to me. Words which inspire, and uplift, calm, and soothe, encourage, and provoke. Words which remind me of the relentless beauty of the world within my heart, and mind. These are a few of my favorites:

“Words are the most inexhaustible source of magic.”

“Fairytales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

“A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.”

“Be softer with you. You are a breathing thing, a memory to someone, a home to life.”

“Fear is the stone we push. May yours be light.”

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quite voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.'”

“Some women fear the fire, some women become it.”

“Wear your tragedies as Armor, not shackles.”

“After a while I looked in the Mirror, and realized…Wow, after all those hurts, scars, and bruises, after all of those trials, I really made it through. I did it. I survived that which was supposed to kill me. So I straightened my crown…and walked away like a boss.”

“I always wonder why birds stay in the same place, when they can fly anywhere on the earth. Then I ask myself the same question.”

“What if the question is not why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?”

“Tired of trying to cram her sparkly star-shaped self into society’s beige square holes, she chose to embrace her ridiculous awesomeness and shine like the freaking supernova that she was meant to be.”

“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.”

“Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”