Awwwtrouble

“She shakes her head, pressing her lips into a line. "It makes me very angry." Her dark eyes look black in the flat light. "Makes me angry still. TO have a place tainted like that...it's another violation on top of the original one. It happens all the time- you go walking somewhere, or swimming or running - whatever it is, your thing, the thing you enjoy - you go to a place, and it's beautiful and unspoiled, and you are doing that thing you love, and then someone - not always a man, I suppose, but usually a man - comes along and transforms it into an ugly place. And you never feel safe there again. And you are never the same again. The place is changed and you are changed, and neither for the better.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“often an empty nest is two birds looking at each other, shell-shocked and nostalgic, over the single worm they’re now splitting for dinner, discussing what to do with the worm leftovers.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people's names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know. And that's fine, goodness knows you've fallen in love with books that didn't grab you in the first paragraph. But that doesn't stop you from wishing they would, from wishing they would come right up to you in the dark of your mind and kiss you on the throat.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Margo's Got Money Troubles