Olivia

“She'd learned that the beginning of one's life mattered the most, that life was top-heavy that way.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged -- after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it's a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot. ”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Most basically, the women in my sample went on to have more children because the value of doing so exceeded the value of not doing so. They ranked the next child more highly than the other things they could do with their time and resources. They embraced a scale of values in which something of tremendous worth was attached to having a child; that something was the kind of thing typically reckoned worth dying for: love for a beloved, love of God, love of eternal life, and the pursuit of happiness. No wonder, then, that women reported their losses as the dying of other goods that were truly good. The American women quietly defying the birth dearth had incentives big enough to die for.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“suppose it boils down to some sort of deeply held thing, possibly from childhood—a platinum conviction—that the capacity to conceive children, to receive them into my arms, to take them home, to dwell with them in love, to sacrifice for them as they grow, and to delight in them as the Lord delights in us, that that thing, call it motherhood, call it childbearing, that that thing is the most worthwhile thing in the world—the most perfect thing I am capable of doing.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth