“I have sat with friends—and I mean very close friends—on those odd, ironic
afternoons of confessing feelings of such intimate enthusiasm or disapointment
that one regrets having made them for the rest of one’s life.”

I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
Ethan Mordden

Suffer the sparrow

“Some say that….to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

“Lulu always puts things she doesn’t like behind radiators. There’s already a bit of beetroot from supper….and a biscuit she got tired of.”

The Chocolate Wedding
by Posy Simmonds

We become our deaths

"We become our deaths.
Our names disappear and our lovers leave town,
heartbroken, crazy,
but we are the ones who die.
We are the forgotten
burning in the streets
hands out, screaming,
‘This is not all I am.
I had something else in mind to do.’

Not on that street,
always and only that
when there was so much more she had to do."

Skin (p. 222)
Dorothy Allison

Human, faulted, flawed

“When two people, lovers, or sometimes friends, have an enduring care for each other, allow each other to be human, faulted, flawed, but real, then being human becomes a glorious thing to be. If the human race ever makes progress, that is how.”

A Live Coal in the Sea

by Madeleine L’Engle (page 105)