Berit Erickson

“He felt bad that he’d never given her the opportunity to get to know herself better. At twenty-nine, she’d become so staunchly, irrevocably Mom to three girls that there was no room for anyone else, and even if there had been room, there wasn’t anyone else, because she hadn’t had the chance to discover any of her other selves prior to the births of their children. She’d given up so much and so little when she agreed to marry him, but he had been so fixated on having her that he had rarely stopped to consider what it would mean for her to allow herself to be had. This was how he saw it: getting her, winning. It wasn’t fair. She deserved more.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“It was funny, she thought, how many relationships one could have with the same man, over the course of a lifetime together.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“Did I understand it? Not by half, but when it thunders you know your chest is shaking.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse