Reb

“Fresh sorrows reactivate old ones. We go to the same well to grieve, and it's fuller every time.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“I had begun to notice that, just like my new friends, other people laugh about their loved ones' observance of peculiar habits, but with the same fondness of possession. She wears a coat even in the summer. He won't talk to anyone before breakfast. I realise, now, that my mother could still have loved me, if she had chosen to. It is possible to know the oddities of people and to love them regardless. I want this to comfort me, but it does not. I had always thought that I was an unloved child purely because of my peculiarities. Since Vita and Rollo and their cheerful celebration of my strangeness, I wonder if there was something else Ma witnessed in me, something that she found not simply different, but abhorrent.”
― Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow, All the Little Bird-Hearts

“It’s a moment every clinician has inhabited and, all too often, pulled back from—a threshold we fear crossing. We imagine ourselves, [...], and recognize a double bind, a new doctor’s dilemma: if we ask about [a patient's interest/personal information], we fall hopelessly behind in administrative tasks and feel more burned out. If we don’t ask about [it], we avoid the kind of intimacy that not only helps the patient, but also nourishes us and keeps us from feeling burned out.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

“Times like this become memories almost instantly, part of a gilded past that somehow coexists with the present. Remember whens to look back on even as they are happening, bittersweet and aglow with sunshine fading to sepia—the late September dust suspended in the wake of a passing car, leafy smell in the air, blue sky reflected in his sunglasses.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies