Smitha

“That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“Still, Eddie envied the way his brother looked in the evenings, so tanned and clean. Eddie’s fingernails, like his father’s, were stained with grease, and at the dinner table Eddie would flick them with his thumbnail, trying to get the dirt out. He caught his father watching him once and the old man grinned. “Shows you did a hard day’s work,” he said, and he held up his own dirty fingernails, before wrapping them around a glass of beer. By this point—already a strapping teenager—Eddie only nodded back. Unbeknownst to him, he had begun the ritual of semaphore with his father, forsaking words or physical affection. It was all to be done internally. You were just supposed to know it, that’s all. Denial of affection. The damage done.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“I couldn't eat because that book made me cry so hard, I couldn't even breathe. Connie said to keep reading and keep breathing, like that was easy. Tears and snot just about came out my butt, I cried so hard”
― Pat Schmatz, Bluefish

“It expresses a craving that so many of us will recognise. Have we really got so far into the realm of electric light and central heating that the rhythm of the year is irrelevant to us, and we no longer even want to notice the point at which the nights start getting shorter again?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times