Cecelia Arant

“ومتى تعلق إنسان بإنسان آخر فهو لا يرى فيه إلا حسناته وخيره”
― ليو تولستوي, آنّا كارنينا

“I flipped quickly through the pages as I waited—made my family a jerky, imperfect movie. It struck me that my mother had compiled mostly a book of her father, Thomas, and me. Others make appearances: Ray, Dessa, the Anthonys from across the street, the Tusia sisters from next door. But my grandfather, my brother, and I are the stars of my mother’s book. Ma herself, camera-shy and self-conscious about her cleft lip, appears only twice in the family album. In the first picture, she’s one of a line of dour-faced schoolchildren posed on the front step of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Grammar School. (A couple of years ago, the parish sold that dilapidated old schoolhouse to a developer from Massachusetts who converted it into apartments.”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

“Don’t worry; you can have your freedom to do what you like. I won’t say anything to my father. My feelings will have to be sacrificed for the greater cause, I suppose.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“By the end of the four-year term, Americans hold a bifurcated view of Mrs. Trump. Many Republicans, especially women, revere her as elegant, graceful, beautiful and wronged by the press. A pastor in Missouri held up Melania as a wifely model to which other women should aspire — or risk losing their men. At the same time some southern preachers referred to then-Senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris as Jezebel, the Bible’s most nefarious woman and archetype of female cunning. There could be no surer sign that the life stories of prominent women affect the lives of private women than when pastors hold them up as positive or negative role models.”
― Anne Michaud, Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Eight Political Wives