Clare Lanphear

“We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.”
― John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

“American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“We’re as common as rain.” And she was right: to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family, even exaggerations make perfect sense; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more.”
― John Irving

“The world was hers for the reading.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn