Juliana

“Actually, her unexpected widowhood made Nettie safely pathetic and safely other. It was as though she had been trying, long before her husband died, to let my mother know that she was disenfranchised in a way Mama could never be, perched only temporarily on a landscape Mama was entrenched in, and when Rick obligingly got himself killed this deeper truth became apparent. My mother could now sustain Nettie’s beauty without becoming unbalanced, and Nettie could help herself to Mama’s respectability without being humbled.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Anyone who speaks to members of his family knows that sharing a language does not mean you share the rules governing the use of that language.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“No really it's for a man who's thinking of committing suicide he was held hostage and tortured and it haunts him and I thought maybe just maybe The Importance of Being Ernest would do the trick because when my mother feels depressed it cheers her up to walk on the Wilde side.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai