Pat Nixon

“Sally, in the far back seat, colored on a newsprint pad, but mostly she stared out the window and imagined living in different houses they passed. Or she looked at the backs of the others in the car and thought, Who are these people, and why aren’t they nicer? For as long as she could remember—from her very first remembered thought—she’d had a sense of coming from somewhere else, a place of kindness and good humor and justice, where people weren’t so grouchy and annoyed and quick to anger.”
― Michelle Huneven, Bug Hollow

“She had to be careful, even now, as she shifted up to fourth gear on the open highway again, to not reinfect herself with that sticky, toxic terror that life—this life, which gave you the beautiful sparkling world—squashed you like a gnat.”
― Michelle Huneven, Bug Hollow

“In 1963, John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal economist and adviser to the Kennedys, mocked the modern conservative for being engaged in “one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is, the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“Of Julia’s wiggly, vertical balloon Sally made a tree with birds in their nests. “El’s right,” Julia said. “You are a good artist. Is that what you want to be when you grow up?” Something inside Sally clanged. Nobody had ever called her an artist, yet by that clang she knew that’s exactly what she was. She nodded and ducked close to her paper, abashed and wildly pleased. Julia said, “Good. You and me. We’ll be the artists in the family—agreed?” Sally has thought of this moment a thousand times since.”
― Michelle Huneven, Bug Hollow