36 Quotes by Sara Barnard

Mum has had an anxious daughter for sixteen years and she still doesn't seem to get the concept of little victories. The spending an evening where I wasn't feeling sick every time someone asked me a question is actually a really big deal [...] There's no such thing as getting your hopes up if you're anxious. Little victories are everything in a world where worst-case scenarios are on an endless loop in your head.

I was sixteen, and I honestly believed I was due a love story.

I was sixteen, and I honestly believed that I was due a love story.

Maybe disappointment does lie in the gulf between what you would do for someone and what they will do for you, but she knows then, in that moment, as she's looking out of the rain-speckled window at the black, black sky, that she needs to stop focusing on what she's willing to do for other people and start focusing on what she's willing to do for herself.

Chronic anxiety is a form of illness. It's not something you bring on yourself by how you feel on any given day. It isn't about happiness and sadness. Anxiety doesn't care if you're happy or not, just like cancer doesn't care if you're happy.

Panic attacks are a lot like being drunk in some ways, you lose self-control. You cry for seemingly no reason. You deal with the hangover long into the next day.

When I’d heard ‘abuse’, I’d thought of violence as being something simple... I hadn’t even considered the framework that allowed it to happen in the first place. The blind eyes turned, the excuses made, the insidious lies whispered into the ear of a child so desperate for love they mistook a gentle tone for truth.

I wondered, for the first time, what it must have been like to leave them all behind and start over. To trust the strangers you met with the weight of the second chance you’s been given.

She was crazy, and she was unpredictable, but she was also generous and open-hearted and like no friend I'd ever had before.