“Hope has its own distinct kind of pain. Allowing oneself to hope — realistically, clear-sightedly, understanding the odds of change — is tying your heart to your sleeve, vulnerable as a new bruise.”

“My mom wasn’t someone who lived for 60 years with cystic fibrosis. She was just someone who lived.”

The first friend I ever had in recovery was a heroin addict. When she first tried to befriend me I thought, Umm, I’m nothing like you, I would never put a needle in my arm. Then I heard her speak at a meeting. It was my story.

Canadian expat Matthew Barlow remembers Gord Downie: “But, in telling us our stories back to us in a way no one ever had, Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip made us proud to be Canadian.”

“I used to drink. I used to drink quite a bit. Apparently that was the fun me, or so I’m told. If it was so fun, I wonder why I had to stop?”

“Stories are the reason we ever made it this far — as individuals, and as a species. Stories are powerful, like thunder and lightning.”

“I had grown weirdly protective of my Franken-scar. I wanted it to remain messy and strange and a little puzzling. That felt right to me.”

Donna-Louise Bishop on dealing with disappointment in a marriage: “Sometimes, even maybe most of the time, one of us has to love that little bit harder.”

“I’ve added ice to my drinks, a way to quiet the burn. Only to learn that though flesh burns, bones don’t.”

“As much as possible I want to praise the hunger and the wanting itself. What your work longs for is to connect with others. That wanting is not ego. It’s artistic ambition, and your art deserves that.”

“Hopelessness is necessary for the hard work of resisting tyranny and fascism. It is the precondition for sustained social movements because history isn’t a straight line. It is a spinning top that eventually moves forward but also always goes round and round as it does.”

“You might feel lost right now. There is always a map. There is always a way.”

The tighter you clamp your heart shut, the more you are constricting blood flow to your brain. Emotion has to go through your heart to get to your mind. Insight requires migration through your mind and back down to your heart.

“The only difference between molestation and suicide is that you don’t die on the outside, you only die on the inside.”

“These men continue to believe that I deserve their opinions. I want them to learn to keep their opinions to themselves.” — Essayist and historian Kelly J. Baker reflects on the men who email her.