Maria

“Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.
[...]
Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bounding handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes ; and even her fifth would flit over the curve of her mouth now and again.”
― Thomas Hardy

“She was thinking about how not to think. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait [...] How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of the sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones- inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones- rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“You must not ever stop being whimsical.

And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

I don't mean it's easy or assured; there are stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely, heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe- that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of love of work and love, a handsome life.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays