Chandra

“The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.”
― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays

“There is a time, she thinks, at the start of any relationship, when the process of falling in love softens a personality, like wax in a warm room. And so two people in love change, just a little, pushing their wax figures together, a protuberance here smoothed down but creating a dip there. It doesn’t last long, the time when love can gently change who you are, and in the relationships that she’s visited over the last six months, the moment has long passed. She has been presented with the shape of her new husband, and invited to either contort to fit or reject him wholesale.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“I said probably they were just scared he was going to put ideas in our heads. She smiled. “Imagine that. A teacher, putting ideas in kids’ heads.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water