Veronica Schram

“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”
― Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe

“Why not admit history's power to divide and destroy? Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer than the new ones? By living in the past, you always know what comes next, and that robs you of surprises. It exhausts and warps the mind. We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgmental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.”
― Lorrie Moore, Birds of America: Stories

“With all of these opportunities and very few demands--especially as some of our parents continue to pay for our amenities--we have been able to extend our adolescence into what used to be considered adulthood. This extension has inevitably pushed off the questions of marriage and procreation, and when those questions are pushed further back into our personal timelines, dating loses its significance as a means to an end, though arguably also a good in itself. And without a direction, dating and relationships lose their rules, or at the very least, some general parameters.”
― Elise Italiano

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.”
― George Bernard Shaw