Donna

“I had never expected that a daughter of mine would look like Debbie. When I found out I'd be having a girl I had pictured...oh, a small, pale, bony girl with a watchfull stillness to her, and she might wear horn-rimmed glasses and in her teens she wouldn't date much and her friends would address her as Deborah. But children veer out from their parents like so many explorers in the wilderness, I've learned. They're not mere duplicates of them. I was fascinated by that.”
― Anne Tyler

“What she believed was that goodness and badness came out of people because of how they were treated. And if you wanted goodness from others, that's what you let come out of you. And the badness? Well, sometimes it slipped out, too, because no one was all one thing or another, but you forgave yourself when you were not who you wanted to be and you did the same with others. It was a pretty simple way of being, but it was one she could understand and believe in and follow.”
― William Kent Krueger, The River We Remember

“If her son had a calling, had one passion, it was for wards on a page, and the magical way they could transport him and his listeners to faraway lands. "Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, QueeQueg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“....the restless chattering in his head abruptly ceases. Just as the ocean manifests as a wave or surf, but neither wave nor surf is the ocean, so also the Creator - God or Brahma - generates an impression of the universe that takes the form of a Swedish doctor or a blind leper.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water