Noël

“What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Their world is governed by children, little despots whose needs—school and camp and activities and tutors—dictate every decision, and will for the next ten, fifteen, eighteen years. Having children has provided their adulthood with an instant and nonnegotiable sense of purpose and direction: they decide the length and location of that year’s vacation; they determine if there will be any leftover money, and if so, how it might be spent; they give shape to a day, a week, a year, a life. Children are a kind of cartography, and all one has to do is obey the map they present to you on the day they are born.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“having a child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“No one is exempt from the possibility of a conscious connection to All That Is. Not the poor. Not the suffering. Not the writer sitting in the open field. This”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple