Alisha

“It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother. Somehow, it seems a form of betrayal. So few do. To join in the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our mothers' indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of their pain, their tendency to drink or teetotal, their warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusion or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that our mothers sweated, labored, bore their daughters nobly or under total anesthesia or both. No. They must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses for the rest of their lives. It is all right to forgive our fathers. We all know that. But our mothers are held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. They simply must be to blame. ("Revival Road")”
― Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008

“But is it proper for the young to be so disappointing? ("Revival Road")”
― Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008

“Oddly, while she was in Linares, she missed and worried about her daughters, and when she was with them in Monterrey, she felt the same or more so about the people from her life in Linares. It was as if she lived only half a life: incomplete in both places.”
― Sofía Segovia, El murmullo de las abejas

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist