7,878 books
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I get this now. I get now that you can love what you have, love your kids and your life and your friends, and still want more. I get that it’s ok to go out and get more—more love, more friendship, more fulfillment—and still be a wonderful
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“Here is the nexus of where work, gender, marriage, and money collide: Dependency.”
― All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
― All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
“Time and again I've been in a group of people in their forties, fifties, and up who, when talk turns to aging, make the typical lamentations, but sometimes, later, softly, confess that they prefer their lives now, prefer themselves now. This secret is kept from those who need to hear it - the despairing young. Movies certainly don't spoil the secret - how rarely they present a middle-aged woman falling in love, for example, or living by herself in any kind of creative and productive way. What I want you to know: so far, it just gets better.”
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
“On another note - Sarton writes about "people in their thirties mourning their lost youth because we have given them no ethos that makes maturity appear an asset." I very much feel this to be true. Turning twenty-one is the nadir of American achievement, one can get smashed legally, and as there are no further milestones after that, each succeeding birthday reeks of diminishment. People start to lie about their age, as if maturity is a thing to be ashamed of.”
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
“Motherhood makes you stronger even as it makes you weaker. Your new sensitivity is a strength, and you should see it that way.”
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
“Do you remember in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! when the Grinch is alone on the mountain after plundering the Christmas of the Whos down below, and his heart swells to three times its normal size? That's the other thing that happens when you become a mom. You feel more deeply. You become capable of a raw, scary fullness of emotion that tenderizes the hardened muscle of the heart. And it endangers you. Because you feel for other people's suffering more than you used to, especially for the suffering of children, as if the love you bear for your child is so outsized that it can't be contained but splashes out into the world, your salty tears brimming the salty oceans.”
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
― Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother
Nicole’s 2025 Year in Books
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