Quotes from Allison Winn Scotch

Happiness is what you choose, what you follow, not what follows you. These are the things I have seen, these are the things I now know, these are the things I will carry with me as I go.

Happiness is what you choose, what you follow, not what follows you. These are the things I have seen, these are the things I now know, these are the things I will carry with me as I go.

There's no time to hold grudges when you've seen how fragile things can really be.

What was the one moment we lost our way? Or was it a series of moments that snowballed into something larger, something intangible, something careeining forward with too much acceleration for us to stop it now?

I might have felt broken, but at the end of it all, I didn't allow myself to break.

There is a moment in every relationship when one of the parties senses its imminent demise. There's a moment of incredible clarity when your stomach drops with a heavy sense of dread, and you feel like control is slipping through your fingertips even as you try to hold on.

You have to know... What you have to know in all of this, through all of this, is that no matter how lost you are in this maze of hell and confusion, that in the end, I promise you, you will be found.

There is the before. And then there is the after. Happiness is what you choose, what you follow, not what follows you. These are the things I have seen, these are the things I now know, these are the things I will carry with me as I go.

I press my eyes shut and will the thoughts away. But they refuse to comply, and instead, they lodge themselves in the crevasses of my brain, poking out just enough that I know they're still with me, like a tiny splinter in your baby toe that gnaws away at you with every step you take.

Outside, with Labor Day having come and gone, summer is fighting a dying battle against the fall air. The leaves are hanging perilously on the trees, knowing full well they're going to make the plunge, clinging on as if they stand a chance not to. The garbage smell that has wafted around us for the better part of August is dissipating, ushered out with the humidity, and in its place a briskness is filtering in, like something you'd smell from a bottle of Tide.

But what's regret anyway? Regret, I am learning these days, is a lot of things. But mostly, it's a slippery seed of longing, of looking back and asking yourself why you didn't know better when the answers were so obvious all along.

I'd recognized it only recently. I wasn't sure if it was because she had changed or I had, but it didn't really matter. I recognized it just the same... If you just noticed the shiny veneer on the outside, they'd always look perfect. So you had to peer closer, watch them when they didn't think they were being watched. Eventually, you'd notice the dings.

I realize that lessons are meant to be learned, honored even, or else you can spend your life running so far from them that you erect a false existence around the very thing you should be embracing.

Jake: I'm not offering up excuses of any kind... I was just saying that sometimes shit happens, and I don't have a choice. Natalie: No, Jake, that's where you're wrong. Me getting cancer? True enough, I had no choice. How you treat the ones you love? Well, there, you always have a choice.

And now here he was. With his love and his hope and, yes, his imperfections, that, in a few months if everything mirrored the events of my prior life, I'd soon trade in for the love and hope of another man who was equally imperfect though in far different ways.

That you can look back fondly or even wistfully on pieces of your life and hound yourself with endless what-ifs, but nothing will change. The present will still be the present. The future will still unfold as it's meant to.

And that, despite the fact that we'd broken up seven years prior and I'd been the one to finally—firmly and permanently—walk away from him and on toward Henry, his engagement and upcoming wedding still ate away at my emotional landscape, as if him avowing himself to another woman was somehow a blight, a pox on me.

The past is who you are. The future is what you do with that.

Oh, Topher," Veronica said with even less patience than before. "Only a man would think that regrets were a liability.

Nothing is different here and now than it used to be: The people whom I need most are gone, and the ones who remain do nothing to help me get to where I need to go. Different names, different faces, but the end result is still the same.

patterns repeat themselves, after all. Always.

life sometimes grants us second chances, and if they should fall upon you, if you should be lucky enough to be offered another chance at happiness, then you'd be a fool not to seize it.

I smiled sweetly and pushed up on my tiptoes, kissing him softly on his too-chapped lips, and agreed. "Yes, to us.

My spine shoots up straight like I'd been plugged into an eight-volt, and the mere sight of him literally causes my breath to leave my body.