Jennifer

“We make such a fetish of the family. I think we've created a tremendous mythology about it. We believe the family must be maintained, it's the basis of society, etc. Yet for a great many of us, the family has been difficult. Many of the troubles of mankind are family troubles, more devastating and more lasting than other kinds of troubles. Almost any well-run orphanage would be better than some families I've known. There are countless unjust and narrow-minded families, and parents who bring up children in hatred for reasons that are invalid.
Just being a family is not enough. There has to be agreement: not a narrowing but a widening, not bitterness and misunderstanding but sensibility and justice.”
― Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River

“The teasing would be fond and good-humored, but she no longer had the resilience for teasing. Marriage to Perry meant she was always ready to justify her actions, constantly monitoring what she’d just said or done, while simultaneously feeling defensive about the defensiveness, her thoughts and feelings twisting into impenetrable knots, so that sometimes, like right now, sitting in a room with normal people, all the things she couldn’t say rose in her throat and for a moment she couldn’t breathe.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“The world is violent and mercurial--it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love--love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Because love is tidal; it goes out, it comes in, it goes out.”
― Amity Gaige, Sea Wife