Cate Brooks

“Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“She was a lover and a lewd cohabitator, a liar and a cherished friend, an aunt and a kindly grandmother, a champion of the fallen, and a late-in-coming fighter for reason over fear. Even in those final hours, quite and rocking, arriving and departing, she knew who she was.”
― Laura Moriarty, The Chaperone

“Hope, thin as a thread, sharp as a fishing line, cut into David's heart." p. 79”
― Thrity Umrigar, Everybody's Son

“I was alone alright. And life surely had been a hard trial for me, so far. From the time mama and Katie fell sick, life had been one misery after another.

But here I was. Still with breath in my lungs. And blood in my veins. And memories and voices in my heart. Good ones. And life was going on, all around me. With or without me, it was going on.

It weren't a matter of the whole thing stopping or the whole thing going on. The whole thing was going on. It was only a matter of me standing up and deciding what part I had to play in it all.

I could be the quitting kind. Or not. I could be the kind of man my mama and papa had raised, or not.

I rose to my feet and did the best I could to scrape the worst of the mud off my coat and pants.

"Sarah's going to be somebody's horse," I said to myself. "And I'm sure as hell gonna make sure she's mine.”
― Dan Gemeinhart, Some Kind of Courage