Molly Schroeder

“But guilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“And both of them are crying then, caught again in the surprise of their grief. After a year of mourning, they know they will not die of it, but neither expects it to go away. Maybe neither of them would want it to go, because then what would be left?”
― Sandra Scofield, Plain Seeing

“Character is too deep to catch in a single storyline. What really moves us - what makes the great stories, and there aren't so many of them - is the inevitability of character. The destiny. All we see is the arc. We'll never penetrate the secrets of the living, let alone the dead. I've spent my whole life trying to understand people, and all I've learned is that the deeper we look, the greater the mystery. At the core, each person is unknowable. Maybe that's the soul? I have to respect that. The mystery, in fact, is what I've loved the most, in people and in stories as well.”
― Sandra Scofield, Plain Seeing

“A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness.”
― Anne Fadiman, Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love