Barton Strebeck

“My dearest Friend, As I am urging our students to write a note to their mothers away from Shanghai, I think of you as a mother to so many of our Chinese girls. The greatness and depth of your love only God knows how to measure and reward you. Thinking of you has always been an inspiration to me. I love you. Lovingly yours, Tszo-Sing Chen”
― Katherine Paterson, Stories of My Life

“I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don't hold the same importance for each other. When Irena saw Josef at the airport, she remembered every detail of their long-ago adventure; Josef remembered nothing. From the very first moment their encounter was based on an unjust and revolting inequality.”
― Milan Kundera

“They had ganged up on her, in the claustrophobic, loving way of families, and she wanted no more of it.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Here was happiness; not my drum, to be sure, just an ersatz, but there is also a thing as ersatz happiness, perhaps happiness exists only as an ersatz, perhaps all happiness is an ersatz for happiness.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum