Hayley Mac

“Before he became a father, he imagined the relationship as being like an intensive version of owning a pet. The child, he thought, was essentially a passive, a vessel into which you poured your love. On TV that’s how it looked. Children were silent, dormant; you went into their bedrooms, gazed down at them fondly, drew the blankets over them as they slept.

But in life, he discovered, parenthood was like – it was – living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was primarily to endure, to weather the endless, buffeting storms of unmediated will.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“This, it turned out, was the most savage, most hurtful thing about being a parent: it wasn’t just coming face-to-face with all your own shortcomings and inadequacies, but it was also seeing those shortcomings embodied in your child.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“To dare is to lose one’s balance; one’s footing in the world. Not to dare is to lose everything worth having.”
― Katherine Rundell, The Poisoned King

“No one person is meant to love in the same way as another: we all invent it fresh, each time, for each person.”
― Katherine Rundell, The Poisoned King