Isabella Dunlap

“Young has nothing to do with love. A woman can be a girl and still know her own heart.”
― Kristin Hannah, Winter Garden

“Time and again, as soon as I got her down for a nap, no matter how much I thought I wanted to be alone, I’d go look at pictures of her. Just because I missed her little face.”
― Katherine Center, The Bright Side of Disaster

“Remember she is as close as your breath.” I have turned that sentence around in my mind for years. I originally took it to mean that she would come from the beyond and stay right next to me throughout my life. Her spirit would wrap itself around me when I needed her. And, maybe. I feel her presence all the time. She has the habit of leaving hearts in the bottom of my coffee cup and sending cardinals into my line of sight when I’m thinking of her. But what I’ve come to understand is that the love we receive, especially from our parents, becomes a part of us. We internalize the ways they showed their love, the things they always said. Their comfort becomes self-comfort. And that love, like our breath, is inside of us and outside of us all at once.”
― Annabel Monaghan, Summer Romance

“A little of her would mourn the end of the play that she’d never get to see, but the moment she was caught up in the birthing, the trivialities of a pre-written drama would be swept away in the thrill of the unfolding natural one. It was such a privilege of a job. Every time that she helped to bring a new life into the world, her soul felt as if it were witnessing the birth of the Christ child all over again and any tiredness was dispelled by the joyous miracle. What power had guns and tanks against such simple renewal?”
― Anna Stuart, The Midwife of Auschwitz