Deirdre Conroy

“Dymphna's talk of concentration camp survivors reminds you that you are super-privileged and self-absorbed and that really your suffering doesn't mean much by comparison.
'You have to choose how you respond to your own suffering. Everyone has to find meaning.'
'Everyone is full of shit,' you want to say, but you don't. You are learning not to say such things. This is what is meant by well-adjusted.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I can't make any promises... I became a scientist because...it's ike panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold. I- I don't know what I want to do...'
'Journalists work in torrents just as muddy.'
The moon is over the water.
'Do...whatever you can't not do.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”
― Robert Hass, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems

“My mother thought, had Caius ever loved a baby boy in the way she loved her baby boy? Had Caius soothed the great singer in those final days, leading her to God? Had Caius ever felt so deeply about a flower or the ocean or life itself: that there was too much of it, nearly? That it was all just too much?”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women