Cynthia

“She is beginning to understand that completion is not so much about reaching perfection as it is making the choice to look away from the material. What was it Khalil used to say when she couldn’t finish a paper in college? Be a”
― Danzy Senna, New People

“And he came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust and affection, if nurtured correctly, might lift a crew above the ordinary sphere, transport it to a place where nine boys somehow became one thing—a thing that could not quite be defined, a thing that was so in tune with the water and the earth and the sky above that, as they rowed, effort was replaced by ecstasy.”
― Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

“But the virus, even as it lost some of its virulence, was not yet finished. Only weeks after the disease seemed to have dissipated, when town after town had congratulated itself on surviving it—and in some places where people had had the hubris to believe they had defeated it—after health boards and emergency councils had canceled orders to close theaters, schools, and churches and to wear masks, a third wave broke over the earth.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“Jet lag had a habit of turning her into her mother, a high school librarian with a quiet drinking problem. If only my mother had been a college librarian, she thought. Then I would have had a real shot at the right ideas.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This