Bari Stefanik

“   "You know this guy in the office I've told you about?" I said to Eileen one night. "The artist? Dan Rosenthal? I think he's getting into practice for being an old man."
   "Oh? How do you mean?"
   "Well, he's getting so—ah, I can't explain it. I'm not even sure if I've got it right."
   She could seldom explain anything to me about people in her office, either. Our conversations often dissolved into admissions that we weren't even sure if we had it right, and then there would be silence until a quarrel broke out over something else.”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“For the natural selectivity of the island I will have to substitute a conscious selectivity based on another sense of values – a sense of values I have become more aware of here. Island precepts, I might call them if I could define them, signposts toward another way of living. Simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life. Balance of physical, intellectual and spiritual life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittent of life: life of the spirit, creative life and the life of human relationships. A few shells.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.
And perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents. I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the willfully blind, accommodators and accepters, thereby overcoming perhaps not their shame, but at least their suffering because of the shame. But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one’s self-righteousness? Was their dissociation of themselves from their parents mere rhetoric: sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes?”
― Bernhard Schlink

“The answers were not easy to come by, they lay in the garden of the past, which memory had dug up and replanted in plots of its own choosing.”
― Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey