Courtney

“Misty sat in her office staring at the pear she had bought for her lunch. It was a hard, unripe little Seckel pear and the thought of eating it upset her. She sat reflecting on the civil war between her character and personality. One had trapped the other. Her character, she decided, was like the tender stomach of a porcupine and her personality was a bunch of quills. When the porcupine is frightened, she knew, it rolls itself up into a ball to protect its vulnerable stomach from harm. The enemy does not know how soft the porcupine is inside; only the porcupine does.”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“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

“Misty's personality was a deliberate creation. She felt she was not unlike one of those seashells that look elaborate, but is only the housing for a very soft animal. There was no point—and no fun—in committing the imitative fallacy in matters of self, especially when the self you were housing was moved by scenes of ordinary human kindness. It seemed to her unwise to let the world at large know how easily moved she was, so she kept it to herself. Even John Bride, who behaved like a creature from another planet who had come to earth to see how its creatures might amuse him, was unaware of how deep her feelings were.”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I CAN take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories