Kate Schopp

“Mourning a living person is different from mourning the dead. A woman whose husband dies is a widow. But there is no word for a person who grieves a living person—a child, a partner, an estranged family member or dear friend. There is no name for what you are when a part of your life and identity dies, but you go on living. There is no name for what you are when you outlive the life you expected to have and find yourself in a kind of afterlife.”
― Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

“Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go.
Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.
Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence.
I still carry these versions of myself. It's a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Religion is something between you and other people; it’s full of interpretations and theories and opinions. But faith . . . that’s just between you and God.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown