Courtney

“I cried only once during the twenty-one-hour flight. I was looking out the window at the moon and thinking of the last long trip I took across the sky, and of the person who went with me and didn't come back. For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body. And it was again nature herself.

Nature. Mother Nature. She is free to do whatever she chooses.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Back in New York, my dad refused to admit that he had a wife, much less a daughter on the way. This fantasy came to an end when he picked up his mail to find a postcard from a grinning woman, with a swelling belly, firing off automatic weapons with a group of equally happy Uzbek men. The caption read, 'Enjoying the afternoon with your daughter!'

On July 19, exactly four weeks before I was born, my father opened the door to find a woman wearing a burka, the traditional dress of Iran. When my mother finally went into labor at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, my dad was finally forced to venture outside his circle of comfort. Having done so—and meeting me—he realized it wasn't so bad out there.”
― Nicolaia Rips, Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel

“Wilderness is the source of what we can imagine and what we cannot - the taproot of consciousness.

It will survive us.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

“Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on 'Midnight Confessions" and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album