Penelope in Retrograde

by Brooke Abrams

They’re just so radically different from me that whenever we spend time together, we always end up turning into the worst versions of ourselves.

I’d hate to be the reason a half-century-old bridge collapsed. My mother would never forgive me for making her seating arrangement uneven on Thanksgiving.

“Because that’s what books are made for. They’re made to connect you to people, real or fictional, even when you feel like you’re completely alone.”

“It’s not the beginning that’s painful in my opinion. It’s the ending that came before it. New moons represent that too. The end of one phase and the beginning of a new.”

“We don’t always get to choose when one phase ends and another begins, but we can choose how we face it.”

“Happiness isn’t a place you go back to. Happiness is a place you build and rebuild and then tear down and remodel a thousand times over inside you.”