Tiffany

“Before I nodded off, I thought about what my dad had said—​that life wasn’t all nice and neat like a book, and life didn’t have a plot filled with characters who said intelligent and beautiful things. But he wasn’t right about that. See, my dad said intelligent and beautiful things. And he was real. He was the most real thing in the entire world. So why couldn’t I be like him?”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

“It wasn’t always going to be morning, and darkness would come around again. The sun would rise, and then the sun would set. And there you were in the darkness again. If you didn’t whistle, the quiet and the dark would swallow you up. The thing is, I didn’t know how to whistle. I guessed I was going to have to learn.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

“Life had its seasons, and the season of letting go would always come, but there was something very beautiful in that, in the letting go. Leaves were always graceful as they floated away from the tree.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

“Nightbitch resolved to demand things- all sorts of things. To ask. To not assume she had to cook the dinner and do the night-nights and clean the house and pay the bills and buy the presents and send the cards and schedule to appointments and keep track of every last thing all by herself. This was, after all, a partnership, wasn’t it? This was, after all, the modern era, empowerment and feminism and all that, and she had not been taking advantage of any of it because, she discovered as she thought further, she did not have a job. Or, rather, she did not have a job that paid any money whatsoever; in fact, it was a drain on money, represented negative money, this mothering job. Because her husband paid for their lives, paid for the privilege she had of staying home each and every day devoting herself completely to motherhood and nothing else, she had felt, ever since she stepped down from her position at the gallery, that she was in no place to demand anything, He worked all week, and she felt it was too much to ask him to lift a finger on the weekend, because she had automatically devalued her work from the start. She had been, she saw now, inculcated by a culture that told her, Look, it’s cute you’re a mom, and go do your thing, but, honestly, it’s not that hard; you’re probably not all that smart or interesting , but good for you for feeling fulfilled by mothering.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch