Heaven isn’t a place of clouds like pillows or gold-paved avenues where the souls of pious people stroll. (God, deliver us from pious people, right? They are boring.) Heaven is a moment like this one, one moment of clarity to realize that all you need is a good sleep. The feel of your lover’s hand against your cheek. The snoring of a sleeping child. Chocolate! Heaven is one stitch among many in a life, and it’s not easy to find, it hides. Because it’s only that moment, you only get a few. That moment of joy when you smile, you feel light, and you look at the brilliant moon and mysterious distant star and say thank you.
– The Secret Women, Sheila Williams

He smiled, and it looked so true she wanted to take it apart and see how it worked. How she could draw that smile out of him again. – Wild Beauty, Anna-Marie McLemore

Travel the world if you can… go over and under and in between, and if there happens to be a man or three on the way, that’s well and good, but afterward just leave him where you found him! – What is Not Yours is Not Yours, Helen Oyeyemi

Never let anyone define you. Always know that you matter. Your thoughts, feelings, and your desires matter. Your happiness matters. – Patsy, Nicole Dennis-Benn

There is so much you want to tell your friends. You want to tell them when happiness looks different than you ever imagined it could—that what you had been waiting for, how you were expecting love to feel and to look, doesn’t compare to another version that is altogether a surprise and nevertheless, unbeknownst to you, what you had been waiting for. – How to Love a Jamaican, Alexia Arthurs

Maybe the only thing we need is to be able to sing the songs we want and laugh to our heart’s content in a peaceful home with the people we love. – The Girl in the Tree, Şebnem İşigüzel

Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes. – Untamed, Glennon Doyle

Just when I thought my life was done, it came time and time again… It has been everywhere, my happiness— when my mother sang for me to dance, when my father took my hand to keep me safe—but it was such a small, plain thing that I mistook it for something ordinary and failed to see. We expect our happiness to come with a sign and bells, but it doesn’t. I loved you and you didn’t know. I loved you and that was enough. – The Love Song of Queenie Hennessy, Rachel Joyce

I thought this must be the nearest humans get to whatever God is, when they hold hands and listen. – The Love Song of Queenie Hennessy, Rachel Joyce