Betsy

“How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Why would I marry? I'm not made to be any man's chattel. I have my work, which I love. I have my home - it is not much,
I grant, yet sufficient for my shelter. But more than these, I have something very few women can claim: my freedom.

I will not lightly surrender it.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can't say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth's wing in the dark.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders