Sally Anne

“I hadn't learned to decipher the mysterious ways of the undermind, How occasionally it erupts into an avalanche of clarity, a sheet of snow shearing off the roof and thundering to the ground, leaving the shingles exposed, knowledge issuing a messenger to announce its arrival.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone —adults promising us their own failed future.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“Innocence is a temporary, maybe even an unreal, condition. Destined to die.

Innocence lost is supposed to be experience gained, and therefore not a bad trade. "The fortunate fall" as Professor Youngblood taught us in Milton 3111. But what if innocence is never lost, never forfeited Then it can't rise to the edifying abstraction of 'experience.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Florist's Daughter

“So what was it then exactly, this truth-telling? ... It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life —of so many more than we think—can never be explained at all.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday