Keri Hurst

“So what's the secret to staying together?" I asked her. "Be nice?" she offered. I laughed, but that may be it, the way a secret to losing weight is to eat less. Be nice. Don't leave. That's all.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“This is the reason that Montaigne argues for a separation between public and private spheres - the subjective nature of happiness demands it. We each need space to try to achieve happiness privately, without interference from the public. Montaigne would be horrified, for example, at the proliferation of social media, where we take what we should, in his view, be private and make it public. Not only is it obscene, it doesn't serve us. We obscure our own happiness from ourselves by trying to project it and articulate it and prove it to others. These sites, he would say, flatten and falsify happiness when they ask us to affirm each other's life choices through likes.”
― Claire Standford

“My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really- which meant I guess that he was still living, too.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Yes, Montaigne,' I said, more firmly. 'Montaigne believed there was such a diversity of humans in the world - humans with different needs, different wants, different ways of being, different ways of experiencing reality - that there must also be a diversity of happiness. That happiness was, in other words, subjective, not objective. There is no universal human nature, and so there is also no universal human happiness. There is only what we each find.”
― Claire Standford