Jess

“Life, she understands, is collapsing down, a succession of memories held not in sequence but together, occurring and recurring all at once. She's in her father's kitchen aged twenty-four, but so is she aged five, aged nine, aged eleven. She is standing where she is with her sisters and her father is here, and yet he isn't.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“Abel wanted a traditional marriage with a traditional wife. For a long time I wondered why he ever married a woman like my mom in the first place, as she was the opposite of that in every way. If he wanted a woman to bow to him, there were plenty of girls back in Tzaneen being raised solely for that purpose. The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood