Cynthia

“Once I was blown up in a Humvee in Afghanistan and avoided injury because the bomb went off under the engine block instead of the crew compartment—a difference of about ten feet. I was jacked with adrenaline for the next few hours and then went careening into a depression that lasted days. I became paranoid about almost everything: where I sat, where I walked, what I sat behind. It was the ten feet that got me—the fact that “so much could be determined by so little,”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

“I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires to not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Like every other mother in the history of time, I wondered if I would ever be able to love another child as much as I loved her.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Eventually you will be all alone with doctors shrugging because they’ve run out of things to do, and the person you really are thumping frantically in your chest: the successes and catastrophes and affairs and hangovers and genuine loves and small betrayals and flashes of courage and the river of fear running beneath it all, and of course the vast stretches of wasted time that are part of even the most amazing life.”
― Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife