Ellen

“Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will
do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and
talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.”
― Tobias Wolff, The Night in Question