Libby

“So many of our habits come to feel like rituals, but if you think about it, few are truly nonnegotiable. I like to have a cup of coffee with a splash of milk every morning, but if there isn’t coffee or milk at home, I simply wait. The day might take on a different shape, a detour to stop at a café or a trip to the market. Maybe I’ll go without coffee until later in the afternoon. This isn’t like that. The necessity of getting drugs and the wolfish entitlement to be high arrive anew each morning with the rosy light of daybreak, and he sets about, diversionless, feeding that urge.”
― Nina Renata Aron, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love

“She never seemed to lose her temper, but it would almost have been better if she did, for it was the flat, dry, passionless redundance of her scolding that got everybody down.”
― Richard Yates, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

“I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“A view
of some tree breathing and the mind’s wheels
ease up on the pavement’s tug. That tree,
that one willowy thing over there,
can save a life, you know? It saves
by not trying, a leaf like some note
slipped under the locked blue door
(bathtub full, despair’s drunk),
a small live letter that says only, Stay.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things